Untitled 12/9

The soles of my boots weather;
time flows on like molasses.
I wander, knowing no general
direction, feeling my way forward
into the premature dusk of
northern winter evenings.
During the daylight hours
I may be caffeinated, timid,
or tame; Come night, I wish
to dance with you, to play
and make games, to hasten
about in a crazed yet
idyllic way – to spread
my wings, blacker than
the falling twilight,
and breathe in the deep,
cool air.

A dream during twilight

She bears a burden that chills her heart,
takes away the aches and pains,
slows the rhythm of life to the minimal
pulse excited only by alcohol and running
away from fear, fear of solutions to what seem like
indelible problems yet are as evanescent
and fleeting as fireflies.
Her body becomes colder and her frozen breaths
can’t sustain her for much longer.
Her warm appearance is unlike that which lies within;
while perhaps thoughtful, calm and capable of true
acts of humanity and love, she is as broken and twisted trees,
mangled not of their own accord,
yet still holding with a firm grip on to the power of life
through each brittle winter that howls and roars to claim.
It will take a year of working,
a year of sun, fertile rains and the
loving being of all that is, but she who
once stumbled in the frigid dark and
grasped blindly for a hand to hold
onto may know herself as herself,
alive and empowered –
nothing trivial, not any more.

Nineteen days and then some

I am on an extended break from my university with months ahead of me, free from just about everything but idleness: no work, no class, no plans.

I never realized how tiring nothingness can get. Days are insignificant – even weeks are depraved of their meaning. I was told that it was a big day on this coming Thursday and that I had plans – I wondered what they were and then realized my birthday, another insignificant event. Business for one day, then idleness for the rest of the spectrum of summer.

When I lay down in a lounge chair outside, or simply collapse and sprawl out on the grass or on the wooden planks of the deck, basking in sunlight, it feels like there is something to do. I then realize there really isn’t, and drift guiltily on into a nap or my thoughts.

Wayfaring will eventually start eating up some of my time, and getting on my bicycle and travelling around the lake, perhaps writing, reading, and music, too – nevertheless, there is a drone in the back of my mind at all times that speaks of lazy summers, of going into the woods for the sake of punching out old, punky and rotten trees, of weeding Japanese knotweed and watching carefully, day by day, by basil grow large enough to make it on its own in the garden. Perhaps poetry will spread its roots amidst all this fertile, tilled soiled.

Lapse Into Soul

The sun sets on
the silence of
another evening.

I see fingers of light
mingle through the
trees, I feel wind
freeze my beard.

The billowing
glow of stoves
and wood smoke
drifts on the breeze.

The moon peeks
through the wavering
clouds, cold, diffused.

People walk before
and behind me on
their way through
insubstantial space.

I stand in the middle
of space, now, the torrent
of blustery existence,
smiling for just a
moment at all the
world now around me,
harmony in complexity,
curiosity in simplicity.

Then, I am gone.

-hrafn

A writer’s winter

The typewriter sings
in the middle of the woods;
the writer’s gone home.

He’s traveled back from
a sojourn of hiking trails
smoothed soft by snowfalls.

In the autumn he
searched for a little something,
came back with nothing

but rough hands and a
pair of broken boots,
broken ambitions.

The pages of his
novels were sundered by the
wind, cast adrift in

sullen storms, into
the upheaval, soggy, bleached,
unrecognizable;

if all his tales are
just allegories of the
long passed, he would write

them again, on a
typewriter inside a warm
cabin, through the winter.

An Offering at Eventide

Wind-borne October;
our love in your evergreens
then felled like lost trees.

Quietest autumn,
sweep us over those seas
to the woods of home.

Ancient November,
over feasting and loving,
quell the coming storms.

Dead December, nigh,
take us through the winter dawn
and up to the sky.

January gates,
burst forth for the coming of
our hibernation.

A year on the wind
whirled about our kin, your love,
a distant seraph.

Come February,
tender holidays again;
the raising of ice.

March and April now,
Ostara, a vernal birth,
sunlight and our mirth.

Walpurgis in May,
Midsummer near June’s closure;
embrace these warm days.

Song and dance, we are
enveloped in your sweet trance;
September, ride forth!

October again.
The wheel has shifted and turned;
now home, there is rest.