For All Who Listen

—Anonymous Photo

PASTEL CHICK
—Carol Louise Moon, Sacramento

This fat pastel chick
looking toward the edge of paper
with an egg-shaped eye
of black-dot yolk,
with its little orange wing
of many tiny red hearts stuck on,

whose two pointed match-stick
legs don't hold him up, but rather
sink into a plush red cardstock,

is just the kind of greeting card
I'll buy and keep for myself.


(first pub. in Rattlesnake Review, 2009)

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SWEET PEAS UP CLOSE
—Carol Louise Moon

Jack Creek Road's alight with many sweet peas.
Most run along the fence at shoulder height.
We smell them as they move within the breeze
and see them as they glow in springtime's light.
Farther down the road, a fragrant sight
that looks a lot like cotton candy pink.
But here, up close, we see in folds of white
what looks to us to be a red eye-wink.
The painter's brush of white—a center of red ink.

_____________________

SPRINGTIME GLORIES
—Carol Louise Moon

I love this bright elusive
month of May;
more sun than shadow
on the cedar path.
The air a breath of songbird;
grasses play.

The towering elm
is home to local hawks.
They spy the cedar waxwing
and the jay.
I'm thankful for the glories
found these days.

SAPPHO DELIGHTS IN LADY SLIPPERS
—Carol Louise Moon

Yellow are the slippers amid the sunlight.
Laced in rich brown ribbons
they puzzle me now.
Does a fairy wear these shoes?
Does she lead me
past the wide meadow?

__________________
 

AWAITING THE VISITATION
—Tom Goff, Carmichael
 
We’re the red-garbed invisibles of the word.
And someone, days, weeks, months—or years?—ago,
has locked us in with a stern, stout iron key.
Here in our chamber, we subsist on bread,
one miraculous bread loaf for us all,
splitting itself unseen, and all we know
is that it feeds our scant ranks royally.
But we can’t exit this room until the bird,
a dove-white bird, all ecstasy, has fled;
that is, the bird-winged smoke, white smoke, lifts free,
supplanting that smoke burned from danker straw,
until we fear the chimney will not draw.
Beneath the bright-plumed miracle, white ash,
the minder of our door turns the dark key:
the blackness that fingered into our throats, the pall,
is gone; the fresh air of life returns, panache
is ours again, our once-dulled robes of the Lord
drink up dawn color. Good again as our word,
we are—and for all who listen, we are the Word.

__________________

Today's LittleNip:

Is it so small a thing
to have enjoyed the sun,
to have lived light in the spring,
to have loved, to have thought,

to have done?

—Matthew Arnold

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—Medusa, with thanks to today's contributors, including the LittleNip from Patricia Pashby

—Anonymous Photo