November 2024
Bio Note: Against the fading sun, slow bees and fast hummingbirds still work the nectar from the red bottle-brush. The UK is closing its last coal plant. AI doesn't work that well at creating music. These are a list of my favorite things.
Dartmoor
I eat alone with bread and cheese
and think about my daughter,
half-a-world away in the fields of Dartmoor
with Devon short bulls chewing cud
motionless except for their jaws
and thick necks as they reach
for soft, spring thistle, content.
Surrounded by eucalyptus and willows,
I search the lagoon for waterfowl,
cormorants, coots,
a drake and hen, an egret,
life away from rough passage.
I overstay, and darkness overtakes.
Stars induce thoughts of artillery,
mortar, the very word mortar--
to hold bricks together
now used to break them apart.
I cannot escape the turmoil
of war, poverty, and strife.
Moonlight from the east slips over granite
like bridal satin down aisles.
I think of the moon in Dartmoor
nearly over the horizon in the west,
those short bulls circling a lone tree
where she might have stopped.
Snatches
She squats in the field amid munificent moisture
and toxins to pick plump wooden nuts
of strawberry, bred hardy to survive the trek
to supermarkets, envisioning her strong daughters
who walked twenty miles in high night-heat
into Arizona and survived the seven-hundred miles
under the floorboards of a truck to Salinas.
She imagines them picking husbands,
men who will not work in the fields,
nor lay irrigation pipe, but teach, sell cars,
supervise, her daughters enjoying jobs where they can sit,
accountants, advocates, women who wear heels,
each strawberry like a ruby slipper
to click out of this world into the next,
a plump authorization of optimism
in her hard world, each basket though but quarters
for wage a richness of expectation
for her daughters, a victory over bad knees,
berries toppling into the plastic baskets
like immigrants into a new nation.
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