Mood Rings

I'm tethered in the moment to a mood,
its shadow cast beyond penumbral light,
a bract of purple-green on blackish blue.
Some guy made rings that measured things with hues
around the time that Armstrong swept the moon
collecting rocks into his gunnysack.

With outstretched hands he gazed toward the earth
now tiny as a marble in its form,
its night lights splaying psychedelic blooms
reminiscent of the time when Hendrix played
his strange guitar strings. Flower-children swayed
and turned in round-a-bouts of scattered gloom.

It's all about escape, each trip we make;
a search for love in war’s long interlude.

Sympathy for God

Imagine that He is
but has no father or mother,
no one to whom He must answer,
yet no one to whom He may inquire.

Imagine that He is spirit
with power to create bodies,
both terrestrial and celestial,
yet cannot be reduced to a body
because He gives life to every body.

Imagine that He is Agape-Love
bound by the essence of ultimate purity,
yet He is opposed
by all sentient beings
who cannot comprehend Him
or understand His true intentions,
nor can His creatures help their lack of understanding
without His help, His love, His grace,
His granting of wisdom
to those who seek wisdom.

Imagine being God
and desiring fellowship with sentient beings
made in His likeness.

We were taught that God needs nothing and no one,
but perhaps He needed us
in order that His joy be made full.

God WAS, and IS
yet did not and does not want to BE alone!

Imagine creating such beings
without creating robots
who can only comprehend their own god-like-ness
by being made subject to sorrow and death.

Imagine that those He subjected to death,
(in order that He could convey the glory of life and righteousness and goodness),
were mostly confused by His dilemma,
or unresponsive, uninterested, unappreciative of the glory of His being
or even worse - thought him cruel or non-existent.

Imagine God wanting to be loved and understood
to the same degree that you and I want
to be loved and understood.

Imagine.

Furvy

I have uncovered
a newly discovered
fact...

Concerning the reason our rugs
never stay in tact:

Our cats are all furverts,
they claw just like perverts;
all things soft or fuzzy they've hacked!

Tears of Sleeping Beauty

"This is but one of several 'versions' of this poem..."

Moths drink the tears from eyes of sleeping birds.
The same is true of certain butterflies.
Sometimes the facts sound much like pretty lies
that poet's choose for loveliness of words.
I've wondered if the strangest things in life
exist just for the sake of poetry,
as if God knew that surely we would be
in desperate need of things that take a knife

to all the sorrow in this veil of death.
Without such wonders we might not endure
this world of pain. In beauty there is grace.
Perhaps for every sadness there's a breath
of love - and in the end all things are pure
as virtues etched in Christ's angelic face.

_________________<3____________________

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10826"
***"Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds"

Summer Scene

I like a veil of leaves on summer grass.
Their absence shows the path where I have mown.
And as I turn to cut another pass,
it feels as though I've hemmed the season's gown.
The golden-brown confetti on my lawn,
kaleidoscopic through the summer haze
is like a printed fabric soon withdrawn
reminiscent of my passing youthful phase.

De Tails

"Don't fret about your prickly thorns,"
said the devil to the rose -
"I'd be quite lost without my horns!"
Such things as these, all heaven knows.

CAT TRICK

I have a disappearing cat
who loves to play in snow.
He doesn't need a magic hat
to carry on his show.

Because, you see, his fur is white
from ear tips down to claw.
He does a trick that's out of sight
until the noon-day thaw.

Lavender Blue Haze

Butterflies in a cage of emotion,
longing to be free, calling out with the notion
that inexistent is the key. - Michel Dargis -1996

Poem temporarily missing, pending publication rejection notice :-)

May Morning

Open wide as a market umbrella,
a white crape myrtle shades my front lawn
newly pebbled with patches of yellow
knots of dandelions. Just after dawn
I wake to the sound of glad singing
breaking forth in a song without words.
There’s no need for a language, the meaning
resonates from the joy of the birds.

To their open air concert I’m bringing
only bare feet and sleepy, green eyes,
and my coffee, of course, while I’m flinging
on a tee-shirt and blue jeans. I rise
up sky-lighted on many-a-morning
to the beauty of nature’s adorning.

The Watering Gate

This very well be the only sestina I ever write, so I thought I'd post it.

- The Watering Gate -

Two people stood atop a distant hill
I saw them as I left today from work
as soon as I had closed the wooden gate
behind me and had drunk a cup of water.
There was no place I really had to go,
and so I took my time. I didn’t run


the way I sometimes do – I often run
as if life were a race. There on that hill,
the silhouetted couple stood. I go
and come the same way every day from work,
taking for granted earth and sun and water.
Familiar things get lost. Sometimes a gate

will make me pause and think; a creaking gate
especially so, and sounds of things that run
like trickling brooks - the peaceful voice of water,
its liquid echo circling down a hill
from clouds that have released their burdensome work,
and like me, found the peace of letting go.

The lie of time says moments come and go
as fast as little lambs run toward a gate
in search of freedom. There is always work
enough to keep us feeling ‘on-the-run’.
The move toward pleasure seems to be up hill,
against the laws that govern moving water.

But nothing is alive where there’s no water
that’s stirring. Living things must ebb and go.
Stagnation lies beneath a silent hill
of graves - behind the locking of a gate
of wrought iron coldness. Living things must run.
An idle body has no means to work

to keep the spirit flowing. Life needs work –
and workers need a living well of water
to keep the heart from fainting as they run.
Recycling is the only way to go.
Our life’s a circle and each of us a gate
that God has set upon his lovely hill.

I bike to work near waterfalls that run.
They’re brisk and full of life and through the gate
I drink the sun-rise lilting on the hill.