Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.
Copyright © 2017 by Catherine Barnett. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 16, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
A diamond of a morning
Waked me an hour too soon;
Dawn had taken in the stars
And left the faint white moon.
O white moon, you are lonely,
It is the same with me,
But we have the world to roam over,
Only the lonely are free.
This poem is in the public domain.
white-throat sparrows/full of note/netted in the eventide/voices sawing the trees/fragile little bodies/tracing frantic circles not understanding/what we must all come to accept/not one day will last/we must end ourselves/as gently as we can take our swords/our facts/oddments of feather turn them into the dark/she takes us as we are windswept/awake with shattering & nothing is as loud as her arms pulling us close/not even these wings landing/forever in the nests of my ears
Copyright © 2017 by Mariama J. Lockington. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 13, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.