January 2016
John Kropf
kropferama@gmail.com
kropferama@gmail.com
I like playing around with words and sounds even if it turns out to be nonsense. I like Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Yeats, David Shumate, prose poems and dozens of other poets. I grew up in small town Ohio and will always feel a Midwesterner but live in Arlington, Virginia with a wife, daughter, a cat and a dog. My day job is working as an attorney but my Walter Mitty fantasy is to write full time. I have two books to my name: Unknown Sands: Journeys Around the World's Most Isolated Country, a first hand account of traveling the central Asian country of Turkmenistan and a legal reference book that has nothing to do with poetry. I keep a blog on books and poems on an unscheduled basis, http://compulsivelyaimless.blogspot.com/
Continental Drift
Australia is a country
is an island
is a continent
like a whole whale fish
swimming toward
shapely South America
who looks east
at her heavy-set sister Africa
indifferent to the chubby bouncing Buddha
Asia swinging its Kamchatka tassel
balanced on a slender high-heeled Malaysian peninsula
while kicking up an ungainly
Arabian Dutch clog
and shaking his Himalayan girth
in a wild waltz
with the baroque lady of Europe
rough and ready North America
eyes the mismatched couple
cracking the whip of his Aleutian braid
and coiling the overgrown prehensile tail
of Mexico in the warm waters below
leaving Antarctica alone
to spin as a top
in its own cold abandon.
Shadow Trees
In the long part of the day
windbreaks of birch and pine
turn sun to shadow
covert emissaries
let lose to roam the roads
As day dies
the silhouettes seep
through the grass
and into the roots
binding the branches
ever tighter to the earth
Over in another part of the galaxy
a middle aged star
throws out violet shadows
down someone else's leafy street.
Australia is a country
is an island
is a continent
like a whole whale fish
swimming toward
shapely South America
who looks east
at her heavy-set sister Africa
indifferent to the chubby bouncing Buddha
Asia swinging its Kamchatka tassel
balanced on a slender high-heeled Malaysian peninsula
while kicking up an ungainly
Arabian Dutch clog
and shaking his Himalayan girth
in a wild waltz
with the baroque lady of Europe
rough and ready North America
eyes the mismatched couple
cracking the whip of his Aleutian braid
and coiling the overgrown prehensile tail
of Mexico in the warm waters below
leaving Antarctica alone
to spin as a top
in its own cold abandon.
Shadow Trees
In the long part of the day
windbreaks of birch and pine
turn sun to shadow
covert emissaries
let lose to roam the roads
As day dies
the silhouettes seep
through the grass
and into the roots
binding the branches
ever tighter to the earth
Over in another part of the galaxy
a middle aged star
throws out violet shadows
down someone else's leafy street.
©2016 John Kropf