Poems

Shades

The truth is some things are
black or white, and something
is lost when we reduce
all things to shades of gray,

blur the difference
between yin and yang.
Beauty lives in the curving
line between, the contrast
of each dot against the ground,
like a third eye, silent,
seeing everything.

On a drizzly afternoon a raucous
sound draws me to the window
to see a murder of crows circling
against a dead white sky,
then scattering to distant trees
to adorn the tips of branches
with inky silhouettes. Omens,
yes, but so alive on this dull

October day that I can only
be grateful for the patterns
of their loops and spirals,
the symphony of
cacophonous cries.

Only on the blackest night
can we see the truth of stars.

You can keep your shadows,
your mists, your fuzzy lines.
I will choose the clear shapes
of things, though the edges
be jagged, piercing, the darkness
heavy with sorrow and pain.

Musical Soup

Spring just a week away, but this raw
rainy day cries out for a pot
of African peanut chicken soup
to warm us through winter’s last gasp.
I turn on the classical music station,
gather the ingredients and spend
the afternoon in a symphony

of chopping, grinding, stirring
to Beethoven, Elgar, Brahms,
and I’m back in my mother’s kitchen,
always full of musical accompaniment
to the clanging pots, running water,
simmering soups and sauces.
Sometimes she hummed along,
so happy to be rolling dough
for strudel, filling the cookie jar,
stuffing the freezer – always with
her hair just so, her lipstick on.

A woman of her generation,
she gloried in her dust-free house
with everything always in its place,
the savory meals her family relished
every night. Her grandchildren still
reminisce about her spaghetti sauce,
her chocolate cake. In her last years,
from her wheelchair, a repeated
refrain: I’ve had everything
I ever wanted. I’m a lucky woman.

And all I ever wanted was not to be
like her, to do more, be more, make
a difference, see the world. The adagio
begins, the violins sing an insistent
question: What of me will my children
remember? Probably not the photos

I took in India, the cases I won
in court, the poems I published.
I stand at my kitchen window
watching rain, inhale the fragrance
of browning onions, sway
to the rhythmic swirl of a wooden
spoon through thickening soup.

December light

It arrives later, leaves earlier
and while it’s here the sun
hangs low as if still leashed to night.
And yet it clamors for attention,
confronting with a radiance
that forces you to turn away.

In these darker days we have no choice
but to view things from a different angle,
to see how the bare bones of trees
hint at the truth of things.

On the chimney next door
a hawk’s pale breast glows ruddy
in the morning sun,

and the disappearing days portend
the end of another year, mountains
of tomorrows turning into yesterdays.

The solstice comes and goes
as each day the sun climbs higher,
stays longer, the angle of vision
shifts. Does more daylight
bring less insight?

So little time to see what
winter light reveals.

Concerto

In the moonlight a candle flickers
to strains of Rachmaninoff.
You remembered what I forgot:
I once considered
the Second Piano Concerto
the most romantic music ever made.
When I told you fifteen years ago,
you put the music on,
and we made love before the fire.
You play it now, evoking the moment.
No, it’s not nostalgia,
nor the music that brings the tears,
though the lush sound still thrills my senses.
It’s this: that you remembered.

Ravaged Roses

When my roses bloom, Japanese
beetles zoom in like kamikazes,
gobble great holes
until a mound of hard brown scarabs
too gorged to fly
hangs from the sepals
where a flower used to be.

I struggle to contain my rage, curb
the impulse to crack each carapace
between my fingers or crush
them one by one under my heel
until digested particles of ruined rose
ooze from their broken bodies.

I am a reasonable person,
willing to negotiate. I disapprove
of traps and poisons. I respect
their right to live, would share
my roses if they would agree
to leave each second rose,
or even every third, for me,
or if they would forbear
from gluttony at least
until the flowers start to fade.

I want to teach them principles
of sustainable consumption,
persuade them that restraint
will help the bush survive to feed
them for another season. Yet,
heedless of all reason, they keep
ravaging my roses while I remain

at war with myself, as helpless
before this huge hunger
as any impotent god
watching the world’s splendor
swallowed by greed.

A Kind of Murder

A murder of crows carves circles
in the sky, assails with a raucous riot.
What synapses are firing
in these corvid brains,
able to plan, fashion tools,
learn and remember?

Am I the cause of this commotion?
What do they think of these
two-legged creatures that do
such unnatural things?

Folklore holds that crows
hold trials of wayward members
of the flock, punish a crow
for crimes such as stealing
food from a younger bird.
What would we tell them
if called to explain ourselves?

Would we apologize
for the messes we have made?
Would we be sheepish
or defiant?  Or offer
excuses, as if ignorance
or necessity could justify
the rising seas, the continents
ablaze, the species gone extinct?

I can see the presiding judge
robed in black feathers,
his beaky face stern, myself
cowering in the defendant’s box.

How can the verdict be anything
but guilty, the sentence
anything but a lifetime
of watching the planet
we call home hurl toward
the fate we’ve created?

The RavensPerch, May, 2025

Supplication

I sit at the feet of the universe
and beg to be tutored.

Teach me, I say, to let fruit
ripen before I reach for it,
to wait for sunlight to push
its brightness out
to paint the shining skin.

Let me not merely taste
but savor long and deep
the tartness and the sweet,
the subtle blend beyond,
to marvel at the miracle
of what a seed can do.

Train my body to sit still
long enough to see
beyond the horizon,
perceive the light
hidden in darkness,
to embrace, not fear,
the dark beyond the light.

Instruct me in my own
insignificance, then teach
me not to care, to know
I am a speck in the cosmos
and yet it fits within my mind.

Ask me the hardest questions,
and hide the answer key. Test
me with questions that
have no answers, then show me
how to accept my ignorance,
rest in uncertainty.

Parse for me the difference
between alone and lonely.
Help me face my demons,
tame them, let them be
my teachers, turn
them into friends.

The RavensPerch, May, 2025

Unspooling Time

What does it mean to live a human life
on this spinning rock, to walk through time
not knowing what it is, looking
only to changes in the sky
explained by different myths in every age.

There comes a day when birthdays
become a burden, something to ignore
or deny as if a death’s head
suddenly appears at your breakfast table
and says, with a grin,
your time’s running out or, even worse,
what’s the point? Then you start
seeing lines in your face
that weren’t there yesterday,
forget the name of someone
you met last week.

And so, I decided not to have
more birthdays. As simple as that.
Just stop, press rewind and start
counting backward. Let Clotho
keep on spinning that thread.
I will play Penelope, ripping
out the stitches she wove each day.
The new mythology of physics teaches
how time can move in both directions,
so let the unspooling begin.

But I don’t want to go back
to the beginning and do it
all again, not even if I could get it
right this time; only to hold
my thumb on the button just long enough
to find that sweet spot, the year or day,
or even minute I was too busy
living to notice, that moment
when it all made sense
and shone with radiant light
that never came again.

And just press pause.

All the Women Came and Sang (Wyld Syde Press, 2025)

September Day

The morning shines like hope,
streaking grass between the trees
with radiant stripes, tipping leaves
with gold, the sky as blue and cloudless,
the air as crisp, as the day the towers fell,
clogging lungs with fear, spreading
seeds of hate across the globe
that burrowed deep into the earth
and bloomed in endless wars.

It was the end of something
and also a beginning,
though we couldn’t see
beyond our shock what else
was falling, what else
went up in smoke.

This is the morning after,
the clear blue sky full of regret.
What could we have done
differently? What should we not
have done? What can we do now?
The questions hang in the morning air.

Today the beauty of the light
evokes an ache of nostalgia
for the innocent time before,
when a blue sky didn’t feel ominous
and there seemed to be a path
forward, however much
we stumbled on our way.

Glimpse, Spring, 2026