Zarathustra Smoked Grass

Two Haiku

You exhale champagne
for those of us who live from
photosynthesis;

the others just crowd
up the air with droll gases
for the weeds to eat.

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napowrimo day 10

apoetreflects:

Native Trees

Neither my father nor my mother knew
the names of the trees
where I was born
what is that
I asked and my
father and mother did not
hear they did not look where I pointed
surfaces of furniture held
the attention of their fingers
and across the room they could watch
walls they had forgotten
where there were no questions   
no voices and no shade

Were there trees
where they were children   
where I had not been   
I asked
were there trees in those places
where my father and my mother were born   
and in that time did
my father and my mother see them
and when they said yes it meant
they did not remember
What were they I asked what were they   
but both my father and my mother
said they never knew

—W. S. Merwin, from The Rain in the Trees (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)

I’ll have
whatever gets me to say,
‘I don’t want
anything else
ever again’.

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napowrimo day 5

It’s Not You

We watch the same sky
with a few hours time shift
from two latitudes
at which the palettes
of sunrise and sundown
pastels differ,
but we both wonder
beneath the shade
whether we are broken
and if it’s a compliment
when we think of the other
in this way,

and it happens at the very same moment
as Teilhard de Chardin would have it,
because longing is an axon that rgew
beyond its skeletal confines
to reach the synapse it once knew
somewhere in spacetime;

perhaps we connect
our consciousness with
the noctilucent cirrus,
whose frozen water droplets
are held aloft
by the polarity of

‘I love you’
‘never again’.

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napowrimo day 16

tender temper

the clay pot
that learned the meaning of gravity
from a few meters too high
and carrying the grains
from the harvest,

and you know the others love me
for my jagged, earthen edges
where the hidden Enemy
might scrape himself
on his transit 
in or out
of our souls,

but to keep the thimble-full of secrets
we keep from our governments
and the sweet words 
that can’t be helped
beneath our breath,
I’ll offer up my belly button
as a vessel for our rain of hope;

sacrifice for the broken
is being whole.

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napowrimo day 24