The elusive light

 Through the cypress

It was a rapid walk at six

To reach the edge of the cypress

By the time I arrived

The elusive light

Was just beyond my reach.

Comes the opening

 Comes the opening

Do you not sense at times

in your mortal flesh

a distant quickening

that you were not one

created for long slumbering

that there is coming

an opening

A way into the 

ancient of days?

Counting crow

 The summer like day

Then comes the summer-like day,

Bids the old man rejoice!

His joy! his last! Oh, the man gray

Loveth that ever-soft voice,

Gentle and low.

Auden

Featured artist

 My turn this week. 

In dream

 In dream

by John Clare Stokes

I cannot escape this stream

forever taking me further

down in the strong current

toward an open gulf 

depositing me to bob

in a tide of the moons clutch

this dream of making it

upstream just once

past the Dottie tupelo

we once measured 

exclaiming it was a record

tree way up here alone

on this upper Suwannee

sending her jams down

to sweeten the journey

jars upon jars of the 

spread upon the sands

to sustain those journey

struck longing to return

 to their Dottie tree.

Harlot route

 Harlot Rout

John Clare Stokes

Must the Harlots always win

Taking at will the fatted men

Making no distinction

Of age or ability 

To function

Just taking the money

Without compunction 

Must the harlots always win

Grinning from the screen

In unseen dens of home

Alluring the gawking in

Giving in to the sin

Must the Harlots always win

Taking all the men

Leaving them but shells

Of guilty Deacons 

Seeking victory over

The overwhelming odds

With God their conquerer 

Kicked to the curb.

Williston

 Three from Williston First United Methodist 

Free oak

 Lone Oak of Lona

Many trees grow by stealth, ignored until they grow to intrude upon power lines or property lines or become belligerent, dropping limbs on roofs or leaves in pools. Happy the tree planted to grow to maturity for generations, free to drop limbs and leaves with abandon.

Mr George

 http://youtu.be/NeWjiphYb9I

When I was a boy growing up in Sopchoppy, I would go out in the Apalachicola in Grimes Bay with Mr George Strickland shown here and his son Robert, one year older than me, to check his hives for bear. I still recall that chilling feeling of coming up on torn up supers. Ole Slewfoot struck again.

O Kentucky

 Oh Kentucky, when I am lonely and the autumn breezes chill me, in your bluegrass hills I long to be, place of boyhood spills and college thrills, where ever I have roamed, from Florida's sands to West Virginia's mines, always it seems I am drawn, to the Kentucky I once called home.

Deer boy

 Deer Boy

I see they finally got

 You deer boy

Oh boy

One-hundred and twenty five

Atta boy

Like a lots

And way to go's

Later 

Hung you for all 

To gawk 

Sorry for all this

deer boy

Granny never wanted

That deer blood 

Transfusion

You were not meant

To live unhunted

You were a deer

Not dear

No longer a boy with 

Spots beneath the palmetto.

With Me

 With Me 

John Clare Stokes

All day she told me

She could sit and

listen to the poetry

And I had just enough

audacity

to believe her

so I stacked deep

the volumes of

Clare 

Yeats 

Burns 

Stevens 

even

some of my own

and waited to read the one

that began with the line:

Maid of the wilderness,

Sweet in thy rural dress,

Fond thy rich lips I press

Under this tree.

then:

I thought of your beauty, and this arrow

Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.

to:

Come, let me take thee to my breast,

And pledge we ne'er shall sunder, 

And i shall spurn as vilest dust

The world's wealth and grandeur!

finally:

God and all angels sing the world to sleep,

Now that the moon is rising in the heat

And crickets are loud again in the grass. 

The moon burns in the mind of

lost remembrances.

And I would have read them all

Had we but the time

But came the arrow

the vile dust

the heat

and this Robert Frosty 

simply melted away.