Urban Tumbleweeds and the Seven Tribes

Juggler, Whole Earth Festival, UC Davis

—Photo by Michelle Kunert

URBAN TUMBLEWEEDS

—Michelle Kunert, Sacramento

Travel along with the "urban tumbling tumbleweed"

  Handed out as convenience bags
  often seen blown around by the wind outside
  in streets and parking lots 

  or tangled as litter in bushes and trees
  These plastic "tumbleweeds" probably don't break down in the sun
  (just like the petrochemicals that make them)
  before they sail to the ocean
  to likely be mistaken for jellyfish and swallowed up by creatures
  Some with labels of thrift stores
  which perhaps shouldn't be making them, either

____________________

BOTTLEBRUSH

—Michelle Kunert
 
a sudden flash May rainstorm:
spent, the blooming crimson bottlebrush plant
spilling red needles all over the pavement outside
like those of a dead Christmas pine tree upon a white carpet

once buzzing with bees for its pollen
now what remains on its defrocked frame

is just the humming of flies  

___________________

Why does that girl run around all by herself around the schoolyard?
  She must play with the other children at recess they say
  Little do they know she daydreams of being elsewhere
  Perhaps she is in her land of imaginary friends where she is a princess
  rather than a "rebellious child" in need of chastisement and punishment

(For Becky Foust, who was looking for poems for those with Asperger's syndrome)

—Michelle Kunert

 Artwork from Short Center North,

Arden-Dimick Library

—Photo by Michelle Kunert

THE SEVEN TRIBES
—Olga Blu Browne, Sacramento

Hiding beyond a shadow's
edge,

returning to the cycle of
time

waiting for the Vikings of
sunrise

and the host of phantom
listeners:

the red thread of the
ancients,

the seven tribes of the
Black Tortoise.

_________________

SSHH

—Olga Blu Browne

Breath is the sacrifice,
sshh—listen to the silence,
read my words, feel what
I wrote.

Sshh—is breath the sacrifice
or merely the memory of a
fatigued mind?

__________________

WITHOUT WARMTH
—Olga Blu Browne

A web of barren branches
below a winter moon,

silent against a frozen earth
where a quilt of leaves

blankets the ground without
warmth.


(first pub. in Brevities)

_________________

Today's LittleNip: 

FLESH  

—Olga Blu Browne

Like an autobiography of
your emotions,

poetry is where the flesh
encounters the soul,

with the power and grace
of your words.

________________

—Medusa

 Yeti from Holland sings at the

Whole Earth Festival, UC Davis

—Photo by Michelle Kunert