July 2015
Poetry is a lonely business, but I have a friend who plays guitar, and when I play bass with him, I find community. My most recent book is In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013 and I've had recent poems in Hummingbird, Atticus Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and other literary magazines. I'm honored to serve as managing editor of the Lorine Niedecker Monograph Series, What Region?. I blog as The Middlewesterner (www.middlewesterner.com), and have put up at least five little poems a week since mid-2008.
The Honeyed Sweetness
of light this morning.
The soft curve of breeze
through the greening trees.
I am an old man
on a new spring day
and everything sings
around me. The sky,
the sun, the grasses —
the fullness of things
even as I age,
even as I fall
away, wondering
how this world goes on
with me, without me.
Our Place
Not water
but a flat
sweep of field.
Alfalfa
like a lake
in the wind.
We dream of
release, of
relief, yet
we always
come home to
this fierce green.
This Flat Land
I have only
this flat land
to speak to me.
Others have their
cities, have
their avenues
of importance,
their whispered
someplace. Let wind
sing above this
land. Let trees
bend with the weight
of sky. Let God's
silence be
all we need to
save the world.
Night Song
The darkness makes us blind
and the blindness makes us
tentative as we walk
out under the sky's dome.
Summer's crickets sing us
a sad song, and we sing
along. No one knows all
the words, and when they go
quiet, in the silence
again we come to wonder,
Who can hear the stars?
That Time of Evening
when darkness gathers
in the corners
of the room like dust.
The wind plays its jazz
just for us. It is enough
to bring the moon out
of hiding, to make us
tingle in the hot night's
promise. We'll tell wild
stories in the morning.
We'll sing the sun up
and it will offer us
another fine day, as
always, if that's how
we choose to use it.
©2015 Tom Montag