November 2024
Ralph Skip Stevens
thismansart@gmail.com
Bio Note: The optional theme for November, hope, is particularly important in the moment we are living in and, God willing, will live through. I don’t have any poems that are explicitly about hope but many that in one way or another express it. Here are three. “A Grove of Birches” appears in my collection, “Water under Snow”; “A robin stalks the lawn” is in “Somehow Balanced,” published earlier this year; “Waiting above Me” is from the collection I’m currently working on, “Settled for the Night.”

A Grove of Birches

She leaves the house, 
me with a stack of books,
and the monotonous drip of rain.
Heading south she
sees a grove of birches
and pulls off the road.
In the evening light
she reaches for her phone,
says she is surrounded by trees,
their slender bodies, 
delicate skin.  She’s not
in any hurry, she says, and
how often does she
get to stand by herself
in a birch grove?
The sky has cleared so
she’s going to stop a while,
and wait for the moon.
It will be full tonight
she says and
will light up the trees.

Waiting Above Me

And I feel above me the day-blind stars
     waiting with their light.
          Wendell Berry

And they teach us to wait
for what we all wait for,
with the frog in the marsh,
singing for a mate, with gulls 
landing together
on the lake.
For an end to pain
in the bended knee and
the beginning of summer.
For the savory pot roast
to arrive at the table, for dawn
to arrive in the sleepless night.
To wait like shepherds,
watching their flocks
under the waiting stars.

A robin stalks the lawn

listens for his dinner, and reminds me
that nourishment, in whatever form,
fleshy worm or cloudy thought,
is present to the attentive ear.
The sound might begin
somewhere beyond the grass,
in the earth below or
in the clouds themselves.
If there is an art to hearing
one’s next meal or some
food for the imagination,
the trick is to stalk quietly, 
or perhaps just sit, 
as now, 
in a room of blue walls,
curtains that sway in a warm breeze
and propose a quiet mind.
There is a voice, they suggest
and in time it will speak.

©2024 Ralph Skip Stevens
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