January 2025
Bio Note: I was inducted into the NCSU Computer Science Hall of Fame and not long after had a manuscript of my poems carried to the moon. Not that those things are directly related to each other or to the poetry I've published in either of my books, Something Wonderful and Something Necessary, both available from Redhawk Publications.
Fog in Low Places
Trust the fog to find the lowest places,
to dress what can't yet be grasped with mist.
In a few hours, we will be crossing this
field, its wealth lost to harvest. Brown traces
of what was missed but not worth the trouble,
the reaper has piled in a fairy ring.
What that means for us, we soon will know.
What we’ll first see are old stumps and stubble–
black-robed priests, stiff, cold, dressed for mourning.
And then darker than those dark spots, three crows.
Spliff
Being this old is the same as being
high at twenty-three on a large sand bar
tenting out ignorant of the coming storm.
The strand, that appeared so vast and broad
in the afternoon when the guide dropped you there,
drowned in tides you thought were receding.
You just lit up a spliff and moved your camp
to the reedy hollow between the dunes.
"This will all be beautiful after the rain,"
you told your younger self. "Wait for the moon."
You did. And the moon became your bright lamp.
Tonight, you dreamed that old naive dream again,
but this time, waves lapped closer to the tent.
You woke completely certain of what that meant.
Teratoscopy
Mothra flew to the moon only to have
her wings singed by reflected sunlight.
She knew too well what the sun would have done.
At night she thought, or so I guess, flames would rest.
She wanted to know flares more by their glow,
but the sun shone from somewhere she'd left behind.
On earth, listening to the stars, I saw her shadow,
saw her wings dissolve from heat, saw her fall.
This is what I learned in the dark, reading
the sky like a deck of cards, like messages
carved on rocks, like broken bones left as omens–
how cold can hold fire, how wings can fall away,
how we still must soar to reach the illusive light.
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