June 2016
Michael L. Newell
astrangertotheland@yahoo.com
I live on the south-central coast of Oregon.  I am a retired English teacher who lived abroad for a third of my life.  Most of my time is spent reading, listening to a wide assortment of music, and walking everywhere I go, as I do not own a car.  Fortunately, the town in which I live has both a river and a large creek flowing through it, is surrounded by forested hills, and is close to the Pacific Ocean.  As a consequence, walking (even in the frequent rainfall) is a pleasure.  
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The Medieval Times


It is darker than I have ever known,
No light in street, window, or home.
All hopes for peace lie in ruins.
It is darker than I have ever known.
Grendel looms and not alone
His teeth munch on bloody bones.
It is darker than I have ever known,
No light in street, window, or home.

First published in Rattle, Summer 2003



Thoughts on a Theme of James Ashbrook Perkins


"Hawks do not sing"

Yet when they take wing,
their brute mastery of air

turns the universe up
or down or steady level

as they need.  Having
only needs, never desires,

they need not sing — song
being the rush of whim, fancy, hope,

despair, prayer, and wild surmise.
A scream suffices for creatures

which are all need or satiety.
Perfect engines for survival, they have no need

for music or poetry — there are
no spaces to be filled in them.

"Music is the food of life" only
when the imagination can grasp

the concept of loss
gnawing at the heart for decades,

or an ocean rolling
across the sun's path in memory.

Song is a survival trait only
when mere survival is insufficient.

First published in MM Review (Finishing Line Press), 1998.



Beauty (That Extraordinary Gift) Is Everywhere


See: a wild-haired child in free flight across a lawn
in pursuit of ball or friend or imaginary

feat of derring do, or something unexpected, that too; 
an old woman who lightly holds the hand

of a toddler on a trek across a street
to a neighbor's home, heads tilted toward

each other in a friendship only possible
between the very old and very young;

two friends' conversation which soars unexpectedly
into terrain never visited before— 

a mountain pass which leads
to sky sky blue blue sky and the freedom wind; 

and a sudden smile which dances like sunlight
across the space between two new to one another.

La Paz, Bolivia (November 14, 2009)        
First published in Bellowing Ark, (Volume 26, Number 4, July/August 2010)



A Variation on Richard Wilbur's "To an Etruscan Poet"


"Not reckoning that all could melt and go"

Or perhaps you did know
"that all could melt and go"

and yet still dared to leave
words whose silence would grieve

for you through future "fields
of snow" and at last yield

words mourning your verses
by a poet who thirsted

to know what it was you,
with your vanished words, knew

so that he might profit
by learning from your wit.

Bereft of your learning,
he grasped the steady turning

of thought, hope, lore, into
trackless fields where wind blew,

where poets, knowing better,
sought enduring letters.

First published in Bellowing Ark.
©2016 Michael L. Newell