January 2024
Ralph Skip Stevens
thismansart@gmail.com
Bio Note: Images of wildlife have always had a supporting role in lyric poetry. “I live between the heron and the wren,” Roethke wrote, and much poetry lives there, too. As our world these days gets darker and crueler, the natural world becomes a dearer source of hope, even as we see that world being threatened. That, the reaching for hope in nature, is one reason that images of the natural world find a place in my poems.

Given the Way Things Are
or might be, what could I do on a dark road, a dark night with the eyes of animals staring at the headlights? Or when I return, see the state of the room, papers and books on the floor, socks loose without mates. I might be tempted to look away or seeing my work scattered like those socks, try for completion. I might watch the fading light fade and the rising sun rise. It could be enough, given the way things are, to count the robins on the lawn, wait for the toaster, fry an omelet while listening to a Schubert quartet, or simply watch the day become no more than what it is, with or without this mess, a day of strangers passing on the sidewalk, aroma of wood smoke on an October evening, or perhaps just the first mown lawn in spring.

A Wrinkled Wing
Let January light say what it has to say, but not about sore knees or vacant memory. Let it speak, the winter sun, soft as falling snow perhaps. You do know that light has a voice? Sometimes quiet, as now, or in summer when it warms a wrinkled wing that unfolds and the Monarch discovers her segmented body is no longer worm, leaf-bound and voracious, but feather light and lightly flying.
©2024 Ralph Skip Stevens
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