Man Shadow

By moonlight the shadow-man creeps
between sunloungers in dark disarray,
raising each to purge the day's
residual skein of grease.

First light recasts that shadow-man
upon a sullied beach, readying
its soft, white sands to be trodden
by soft, white feet.

(c) 2013 Slush Poet

Footsteps of Dancing Giants

My illustrated Bible primer, I recall,

showed Moses cowed before a great unholy wall

of water, thrown up as one might a Persian rug,

a salivating oh-so-living sea, frozen

in frothing abeyance of malice over the heads of God’s chosen

tribe; thus Zion was raised, the graves of Gaza dug.

But what’s that to a boy of ten who rode in a whale

and built an ark and tamed a lion all in a day?

Invincible in flannel shorts and with mother near

I tacked and gybed about the knees of dancing giants,

doughty as David strutting through Gath with his flaccid appliance

slung from his belt and Goliath’s titan head on a spear.

So small again so soon; some years are strangers, others

visit like nest-flown children; memories, like that of my mother’s

worried frown, for instance, haunt like infidelities.

And if I cried like a newborn the titans rushing by to their clients

wouldn’t take my hand like I would have when I was a giant

and they were only children at my dancing knees.

(c) 2013 Slush Poet

On the Meadow at Eaton Ford

The floodplain spread out like a manuscript dropped at our feet, the horizon

in hiding beyond sight and thought, or shadows of border and copse,

or of violet rooftops and ridge tiles, or the red-brick church’s weathercock

rampant in the slipping dream of summer on the opposite bank of the Ouse.

An impatient moon loitered in the wing of a cellophane sky

as a suicidal willow dithered teetering on the riverbank,

morosely stroking the water while lifetimes slithered through its fingers

and ruing the desolate wastes that lay in the shade of its tears.

And Juliet walking beside me, her skin more arresting than September,

said what are you thinking? and my thoughts froze in the glare of her inference.

I led her from the path and we waded through uncharted daisies and clover,

to a wilderness of dizzying maybes where shadows take pity on sinners.

I felt the warmth of her bare arm swinging inches from mine:

how artful she was they not touch! By the veil of the willow’s undercroft

I wordlessly reached out to thread my life among her fingers;

she squeezed my hand, smiled, then like a widow reconciled, let it fall.

(c) 2013 Slush Poet