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Hello Friends and Neighbors and Poetry Lovers Everywhere.

I promised a Poetry Blog site and, by golly, I'm delivering.  Here are three little introductory poems for you to read in a thoughtful way.  Then you can tell me you're heading off to something a whole lot more entertaining.  Or you can offer encouragement and beg for more.  Or you can feign interest while remaining indifferent.  Enough said.  Poetry now.

Making Firewood

When the maul falls

With just the right force
A section of tree trunk
Divides cleanly
Into chunks of fuel

But as the hours pass

And lifting
Stacking
And swinging becomes
More difficult
Cleaving is less precise

Knots in the wood

Turn into deflectors
Of perfect cuts

Power generated by

The physics of motion
And weight
Levers and fulcrums
Slows and weakens
Break time arrives

Cold beer is the reviver

Then back to work

Rosemary

She was brittle and dry

Wouldn’t cry, laughed
Like oil burning
In a hot skillet

As a first love

She was the best
And a broken heart
Was guaranteed

That early pain

Prepared a young boy
For the softer hurt
Coming down the road

Softer hurt because

No ache is stronger
Than love’s first ending

References

Walking through shaded streets

Of a seaport town
I was grabbed by the clutching
Fingers of an intense
Pale skinned young man who babbled
On and on
Something about an albatross
And a ghost ship

Of course he was crazy

Perhaps he spent too much time
In one of the nearby opium parlors
I don’t know, I brushed him off

But I was soon back on the steamer

Headed for the canal passage
When the writer fellow who was chasing
The cook’s helper ran screaming
And bleeding from the galley to crew’s
Quarters where he shoved
His papers into a duffle clambered up
The decks to the open air
Stepped up on the rail and jumped

We didn’t really try to stop him

He wasn’t much of a looker
And spoke only when spoken to
Another loser lost at sea

As the freighter squeezed itself

Out of the canal into the Pacific
I considered the journey
Was it all posturing, was I making
Progress?  Imitation is flattering
And I paid obeisance to many
As my fingers pecked their way
Across the keyboard again
And yet again

Finally my Idaho was reached

And the great man sat in his foyer
With the shotgun pressed to his
Palate and my imitation found
Its limit and with that the journey
Began again, this time going

Solo, that much harder path

Where scrambling for footholds
Is never ending but where failing
Doesn’t have to be fatal

So there you are.  A threesome.  Now go read a good poem by a big time poet.