tortured into significance.
The water
falls as we choose, upward even, imposing order
that comes from us alone, not chance.
Among all these rocks and rivers
we suffer
our own creation; shuddering into life, we bear
upright the weight of good weather.
Donald Lehmkuhl
BUDDED OAKS
I waken, winter gone like sleep,
And I, who had gone with it,
Go with it no more: thirty
Is a task that has been done,
A path below the budded oaks.
Blood sings
in
a crown of dust
And I, alive
in
a listening
Skull lift down the wrinkled skin
That laughter wore, that I
Will wear to dress all love,
All laughter stiIl to come-
For ugliness wiIllast forever
And I would have a hundred years
In this same skin and all
The young and all the old
For lovers. I do not walk alone
Who walk with morning on the hill,
For the round earth and sun go
Before me toward the grave and red–
Leaved maples cry out to my blind
Image in the cold and moving stream.
Patricia Coombs
