February 2017
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.
Another Morning
The hawk down
on something small,
tearing death from
the edge of earth,
lifting God's
silence to God.
Kansas Afternoon
Cottonwood
shakes its finger
at the wind.
And there it
goes again.
Who knows
what it means.
Sun Down
The light fades to
faintness. The wind
lets off. The things
we want stay here.
Nothing has been
lost. This is a
holy darkness.
Again
A storm
in the mountains.
The monk
shakes his stick
at God
and grumbles.
Darkness
eats his heart.
These Days
Sun just the sun
for us. Moon our
broken piece of
earth. The rising
of these days.
The settling
distance where
we spin. We came
out of the sea.
We go back to
the stars, like
going home.
©2016 Tom Montag
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