—Poems and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA
BLUE CORVID MISCHIEF
Scrub Jay balances on deck support, bright & gay
as blooming bougainvillea, though the calendar
says November. Jay screams on-stage raucous
to rescue a play otherwise jinxed or, on a parallel
plane, begging peanuts, kettle-corn, potato chips.
OVER THE TV NEWS
Smoke from our chimney spreads away
like an underlayer of cloud
this November dawn gray on gray,
muffling soft whatever was loud.
Oh what shall we begin today?
CONSIDERING LIGHT
an inverted terza rima
It’s morning by a single solar lamp
I recharged yesterday, a be-prepared
against another outage, volt and amp.
I like the dark, its secret closeness shared,
and natural daylight when sun limns the hill—
the pale rind of a fruit that’s freshly pared
for morning. Trees are going leafless, still
and waiting. Anything can be, today.
A woodstove fire to warm the indoor chill.
I’ll walk outside to greet a cloudy day,
its filtered glow through clean unscented air.
No smoke, no wind, just subtle dawning gray.
A day for savoring each glint of bright
and each illumination like a prayer;
a day for opening the eyes to light.
PHOENIX RISING
a paradigm
Why does fire love wind?
Red-gold wings lift off and fly.
What good is cold ash?
He scattered his wife’s remains
and they blossomed daffodils.
We watched dead faces
on the news, burned-out families
home-hopeless—and now
look, they’re coming back, they call
that place home again,
Paradise out of ashes.
Our mountain ridges
ravaged by fire, a moonscape.
A year later, we
walked among skeleton pines—
new green bursting underfoot.
She fell to her knees,
beat the charred ground with her fists,
saw nothing but loss.
Tears like so many seeds,
she was rooted to the place.
Fireweed blazes in
the meadow, and soon lupine
blue as smokeless sky.
URBAN TURKEYS
for Brigit
Did I tell you about the Tunnel St turkeys? They saunter down Spring now, as far as Hwy 50—maybe even visit your old Cottage neighborhood. They have the right-of-way, travel lane or centerline. 2 wild tom turkeys (dad & son, I hear) in the midst of rush hour traffic. School bus halted at 4-way stop, turkeys stonewalling intersection; no one honking—this is Placerville. But now it seems the turkeys are under arrest. A friend took photos: police on turkey-roundup with a trash barrel. Turkeys being deported? or Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless rousted off Quartz Hill? They’ll be missed.
traffic stopped 4-ways—
wild turkeys strolling crosswalk,
law-abiding birds
NOVEMBER WESTBOUND
Sun inhabits cottonwood leaves
briefly yellow before they fall;
lights a roadside cross that grieves
its passings, which the earth receives
with promises of springtime’s call.
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
an Imayo for Hatch
Blindness may smudge your poems but the lyrics stay
beyond mischief of writing, typos, blurred vision.
We gather to share our words, from memory you sing
a tune pulsing words to heart—and we remember.
_________________
Today’s LittleNip:
THANKFUL ALL YEAR LONG
—Caschwa, Sacramento, CA
for those tiny bits of food
that we are lucky
to have
at all
which get stuck between our teeth
that we are lucky
to have
at all
and are hidden from our sight
that we are lucky
to have
at all
_____________________
Taylor Graham sends us a lovely spread for Thanksgiving Day, and we are so grateful for her poetry and photos of wild turkeys and displays on Main Street in Placerville. Today she’s talking about smoke, our recent Seed of the Week, and she sends us several forms, too (can you spot the quintillas?). About the turkeys, every now and then somebody decides that wild turkeys in this area are “too many”, so county officials come in and swoop some of them up and “deport” them to someplace else. (The parallels with national government are endless here…) And thanks also to Caschwa for his insightful and appropriate LittleNip!
For more about the Japanese poetry form, the Imayo, see www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/imayo-poetic-forms/. (Note, while you’re on Writer’s Digest, that Robert Brewer has “Poetry Form Friday”, plus a year full of “Wednesday Poetry Prompts” and other good stuff at www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/poetic-asides/poetry-news/). And here’s an article about writing Haibun: poets.org/text/more-birds-bees-and-trees-closer-look-writing-haibun/.
—Medusa, wishing you a wonderful, thoughtful Thanksgiving Day!
—Anonymous
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.