Bereaved

Outside my window
A gray, thunderstruck tree
Sags with bent shoulders
Bare-branched and anxiously bowed
It tilts, as if into a future
Where you might return

Birdsong

Sweet mute bird.
The cold season
Stays your tongue
And dampens
The fluttering
In your chest.
Yet you greet each day
With anticipation —
Awaiting
That first performance.

Rebirth

Plum bud under snow
A lonely wind stills its cry
Waiting for rebirth

On the Mountain Peak

This blanket of silence
Smothers tender feelings and hopes
But if I fail to yell
Who shall hear me?
At least the mountain echoes my thoughts
Perhaps we were both awaiting
Each other

Vampire

A Nightmare roosts on the bed post
Its sickle-shaped wings folded in repose
Waiting for evening to draw its curtain
And the sleeper to lay her head

Central Park in the Fall

Urban squirrels fat with handouts
Lounge on limbs of light
Dappled green and yellow
Red creeps along skeletons of cambium
Woodpeckers call to mates and friends
And the feeders hang heavy with black sunflower seeds
Waiting for the winter that’s been delayed
Chickadees and juncos always arrive
Fashionably late

Insomnia

Night rolls into morning rolls into night
Hunger comes only as a dull pang
As if still half-asleep
Unsure to enter or exit
Tiredness sits behind the eyes
Veiled in red spidery webs;
There isn’t an end, only waiting

Awaiting a Soldier’s Return

Sewing a peony on the silken kerchief
I think of your single-lidded eyes
What delights do they behold?
Rolling vales misted beneath the mountain
Shadows veiling the moon on a cold autumn night
A candle wavering in the room above the inn
Smelling faintly of smoke and plum wine
Or perhaps, you only seek the end of a long road
Your body swaying in the saddle on the way home

Rainy Day

The rain like a spangled veil
Bars the sky from earth
And the earth from sky
The sun plays shadows
And the clouds, shapeless dreams
Until both meet again