Bird

She picks flowers from the air
with delicate fingertip grasps
and transforms them
to random words, spoken
in the same gentle spirit
by which she plucks
meaning
from the space
between us.

In whispers
the words rise
to where she found them.

Then I float
full of wonder and dread
through the doorway,
past the nurses’ station,
down bland corridors,
out into night air
and the mudpuddle splash
of voices in recent rain.

I enter other rooms,
into an intense,
cinematic,
boisterous, rapier
flood of syllables
which washes me
out
into the street

where I pick flowers
from the air
with trembling hands,
receive a communion
melt on the tongue
of words
drifting far
from this world.

—–
Poem for dVerse Poets Open Link Night.

Niagara

A boy’s kite sails
across the river,
its string becomes cord,
swells to cable
which sprouts a bridge.

A locomotive shuttles,
iron upon iron,
over the roaring tumult
soon to tumble as rain
for three seconds.

The train moves on.
The flood becomes ocean.
The boy grows old.
Cry for him

if you’ve time.

Another Reason I’m Not A Concert Pianist

You sweated for years,
a serf on a manor,
tilled fields with oxen
and a wooden plow.

Marriage and children,
summer and snow,
tithe and obeisance,
shovel and dirt.

The plague swept through
and you survived.
It came again,
you didn’t.

Carried from you to me,
one single thread:
the gene that makes my index fingers
bend away from each other

at the knuckle.

===

A web page with interesting facts about: genetics and family tree

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 7,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 13 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.