Resting in groups, wrapping ourselves in seaweed, we resemble a raft, staying close while the sea rocks us to sleep. That's why you call us a "raft of otters." Makes you wish you were one of us, right? The Otters and the Seaweed This is what you need to know: you need to know that [...]
Two poems offered in celebration of National Poetry Month and Earth Day. May you find splendid ways to honor the creative spirit and our beautiful mother, Gaia. Choices I go to the mountain side of the house to cut saplings, and clear a view to snow on the mountain. But when I look up, saw [...]
This imaginative poem opens with a playful image. From there, we take a long yet concise journey and land on something quite unexpected. Enjoy! In Space In space (the experiment suggested by two fifth graders), a Canadian astronaut wrings water out of a towel. It stays by the towel, horizontal transparent isinglass, a hyaline column. [...]
To the simple, humble stone: All praises! Stone Go inside a stone That would be my way. Let somebody else become a dove Or gnash with a tiger's tooth. I am happy to be a stone. From the outside the stone is a riddle: No one knows how to answer it. Yet within, it must [...]
The Two-Headed Calf Tomorrow, when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the [...]
How Would You Live Then? What if a hundred rose-breasted grosbeaks flew in circles around your head? What if the mockingbird came into the house with you and became your advisor? What if the bees filled your walls with honey and all you needed to do was ask them and they would fill the bowl? [...]
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone-- and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the [...]
Across a lake in Switzerland, fifty years ago, light was jousting with long lances, fencing with broadswords back and forth among cloudy peaks and foothills. We watched from a small pavilion, my mother and I, enthralled. And then, behold, a shaft, a column, a defined body, not of light but of silver rain, formed and [...]
The First-Ever Poem of the Month! Long Live Poetry! When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the [...]