Poems, poems, and more poems… taking a look back at a few from years past. Enjoy! Happy Christmas, Happy New Year!
Petrifaction
All Us Golightlys
Finally (The Only Truth)
So Fashionably Smudged
What it feels to repeat over and over
To be with the summer people
Like My Skin Bursts Away
It seems, under such disappearing dusk,
years end like a funeral march, beautiful.
Seconds with frozen breath ascend to heaven.
Small lights shimmer then go quietly cold
beneath the pulse of evergreen fingers (undeterred).
Snow swirls patiently to a final resting place
with us who find, with each step, we sink lower,
lower. Soon our family will cover our eyes with
petals and coins. Another year will end.
in the way of magnets
such exquisite dance of limbs
our opposition: arms crossed, back to back,
unrelenting stand-off
then such a turn, you and I
eye to eye, drawn down a path, pulled
suddenly together
with a force of ancient strength, our
two palms pressed
transformative and stuck.
(had a dream of magnets… inspired this 3:07A piece)
This cold wind
stings eyes while
pinching cheeks red.
Cold wind like death,
a playful devil,
seems to whisper
“did you really think
you were the one to
get away?”
But, what if we lived in California,
what if we moved south of here ….
We were born to roam midnight streets
to leave sticky notes of jazz on exuberant thighs
stopped beneath streetlights of dancing rays
gnawing here and there, tipping them back, tossing aside.
We die each hour of impending day but
the streets become a blues pulse, thumping. Again,
hold on to night’s desperation and grind slow
into cobblestones content with the hour still late, late, late.
when the moon is high, there can be
no pity, no regret.
dive into that grave dug for you,
freshly turned soil soft such
welcome respite from a season
spent clinging to… to
summer, hope,
last rays of light as they hit the lowest angle
and bleed across the sky –
there is no shame in lying among the moss and the dead
giving themselves to dirt.
sleep easy before the quiet snow,
one simple silver bell toll at a time,
becomes a burial shroud, so calm, so inevitable.
i am the loneliest soul.
a shadow moving silent beneath
no one’s hands. Strong
like backs of trees in late November
losing all those leaves
to a hungry season, a cold
as scrappy and conniving as a
starving animal, i
understand these trees, we
stark trunks
in the dark belong to no one
and stand alone under a
moonscape of dreams blown to dust.
the skin of a bumble
bee is 1,000 year old spider web
fuzz, stroke it,
coax it,
“come back”
to this
taut trembling hand.
(was there a time when we
spent all day with flowers and bees?
a time of gentle buzz
yellow sweaters, big sun?)
how to coax him back
how I wish I could stroke his skin
just one more time.
a fox in Clifton Park
crossed a road,
slipped among shadows.
some shadows are happy to be stretched
down long roads of abandonment.
then again some girls are easily bare
long legs thin and tough, scrambling side to side.
absurd, a fox here in a park of burnt out grass
trees choked
shadows stretched too thin
but hey, that’s the city.
around every corner, alley, boarded home, rats find a nibble.
girls slowly pull on their tights.
a fox makes a deal and gets away.
in the dark air a hint of smoke wraps like a scarf
around us, two hand in hand,
newly bundled with wool
and shuffling through the past
underfoot like so many dead leaves not raked.
Poetry by JC Snyder 