In this dream
In this dream
I'm waking
Seeing beside me
One so long
Since grown
Staring straight
Through me
I try and touch him
But my hand
Falls upon the pillow
Beyond him.
Thursday, May 29, 2025
Ole Homewood
Ole Homewood
John Clare Stokes
It was good
As it stood
Slave Gavin built it
Turn of century
Four squared it
Lucille Towles sold it
home with ten acres
late sixties
Luther Ray grew on it
muscadine and cane
Then blight
Came around two thousand
Can't explain
The gone insane
Movers came
Took a year
All so dear
Cut in two down dog trot
towed to Sopchoppy
In a day bulldozers came
ten acres turned under
Torn asunder it
Lucille’s promise
told to Luther Ray
Broken
Never to sell
Or fell
The old oaks
Some folks
Don't take it
Seriously
Promises
To have and hold
Til death do us part
Preferring rather
To Rip the heart
From the fat lightered
never painted pine.
Turning under
family and all left behind.
My poor shadow
The shadow beside nobody
The shadow is not enamored
With celebrity
The shadow cares less
If he's well known
The shadow is content
To follow or to lead
To be long and slim
Or short and squat
To be halt
It doesn't mind
Even when the sun don't shine
upon the one he's
Stuck with.
Midwife Missouri
Midwife
"And because the midwives feared God, He gave them families."
Exodus 1:21.
John Clare Stokes
They were the bone lean days following
the late great war of Northern invasion,
the long drawn death thro's of a nation
but for the love of Laura, Sherman sparing,
his terrible swift sword taking Florida's life,
Georgia feeling the ravages of spurned victory,
the orange blossom never to fall into his bands of savagery.
Into these times of lean came to be a midwife.
Sabbath days at Hopewell Primitive Rev.Eubanks would pray,
For Charles, Eliza, Willey and Missouri's little Cauley
And that day on the bare toes he would step lightly,
for these famished souls had enough already of hell and misery.
Too far away to send for Doc Ives in the first horseless Buick,
Twenty-five miles from Lake City an ocean-like eternity
by mule,through sand way up and lost on the Suwannee,
but not the midwife the labor cries she would seek.
Beside the birthing beds from Benton to Suwannee Shoals,
Missouri the unmarried midwife was to all as a mother,
her pleasurable sins so easily forgiven her,
Missouri Wheeler by whose hand came so many souls.
And in the dead of night along the old Suwannee river flowing,
The new mother blesses the midwife who they could not pay,
But the wages for Missoui the men found a way,
Script beyond the folding,more precious than any money golden.
As told not literal, but poetic.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Milk and wine
Of milk and wine. In the sincere delivery of the given milk, a breeze through the open portals stirred, gently rippling over tears and wine spilling,entering all in the mystery.
After Whistler
Today I collaborated with Whistler. Combining our images. It was a quick study. I shall return and expand just as Whistler would do.
Setting out
Setting Out
Wendell Berry
Even love must pass through loneliness,
the husbandman become again
the Long Hunter , and set out
not to the familiar woods of home
but to the forest of the night,
the true wilderness, where renewal
is found, the lay of the ground
a premonition of the unknown.
Blowing leaf and flying wren
lead him on. He can no longer be at home,
he cannot return, until he begin
the circle that first will carry him away.
Love for Watts
If, mounted on a morning ray,
I fly beyond the western sea;
Thy swifter hand would first arrive,
And there arrest thy fugitive.
Isaac Watts
Worm man
This worm of a man
sat in contemplation
of being a worm
now that’s a good thing
for that’s what sets
him apart from a worm
the ability to squirm
before the hook has
even been stuck in
Consciousness
Compensate quick
O’er coming
It was the first exposure
of the day
the heron coming my way
Quickly I said
move the compensation
to plus one point three
for lately
Shadows have been
giving me fits
and then the heron
had flown
and I went home
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)