Azalea Plea.
Should I bloom for you
or freeze and fall
life between gray and blue
Saint Peter and Paul.
wailing wall or
curtain call
Bloom not for me
Or Peter or Paul.
Bloom only
Despite us all.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Silent Yeats
Silent Yeats
Johnclarestokes
Last evening sitting beneath the heavens with Yeats
We had long silences and pauses between the
Silence
When he spoke
Pity the poor who know not the poetry
Who must fill the silence with words
I sighed
Oh Yeats, must you too ruin the silence?
Kettle calling
By the fire they were there
Johnclarestokes
There seems to be
Some remnants of magic
In the old syrup kettle
For every time it's fired up
And the warmth is spread
The smoke ascends
It seems there are those
Descending around the glow
The embers are stoked
Without a poke from anyone
These days the kettle fires
In the cold
Are the only way they come.
Con in the loft
Convict in the shed
Johnclarestokes
It evokes a few lines of prose in me
That old wood and tin I once knew
In the cool dark sand among the relics
Sun light glaring in between the cracks
Sounds in the rafters would startle
In reality but a corn snake after the mouse
To me the escaped convict hiding out
And I’d quietly creak up the clasp
Scurry into the kitchen beside grandma
She’d glance down from the stirring, say,
“Why boy, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”
I didn’t venture much into the dark din
Every now and then I’d bravely peer in
Listen for the rustling from the rafters
Never told the Sheriff I knew where the
convict was they were after
Free to this day in the shadows hiding out.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
who knows
Not by degree
John Clare Stokes
Who knows the moon
In all its gaseous gravity
It's place within the
Milky Way
Who knows the heavens
In all it's circuits precise
The exact type of
A comets ice
Who know the trees
Can count the very rings
Telling them how to
Allow all to breathe
Who knows your being
The reason for your
Asking or calling
Upon Him
Why it's the hidden
The one without
Degree
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Cold dreams
Cold Dreams
John Clare Stokes
The old upright was a place
Of delight
By the soft glow of night
She would reflect upon
Where she had been
Before the labored breathing
Confined to the home
Each little magnet
A story of a place
Routes she never again
Would trace
But in her cold dreams
She was traveling
Breathing free
Sunday C
Key of C
John Clare Stokes
Some Sundays
Mostly
I do not want to go
Hear your hollered hallelujah
As if Holier is more than me
Quietly out of that
Spirit
Some Sundays
For an hour
Can we just dwell
Upon the Key of C
Struck softly and tenderly.
Ground Floor
Ground floor
John Clare Stokes
Aren’t these the days
When we lament
We shall not make it
Above the ground floor
We want to climb
The stairway to Heaven
But something seems missing
Holding us down
We chalk it up to flesh
To some transaction in Eden
We don’t look to the bleeding
From the basement
Stick figures
Stick figures
I think I was amiss
In the thinking
I’d happened upon
A kindred spirit
John Clare Stokes
I think I’m ivory billed
Heading for extinction
Stick figures dancing
Across your canvas
Perhaps there dwells
Beyond one fully evolved
In the dimension
I dwell in
Peace of wild things
One of my favorites
The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry
Artist Kari-Lise Alexander
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
From Eliza Beth Gaines
Southern sew
The pluck of the Southern men in gray
The Southern women in homespun array
The hands that mend as they pray
The Southern cause to win the day
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