GoodReads

C's bookshelf: read

The Peculiar
Maggot Moon
Chime
Leviathan
The City and the City
Graceling
The Road
A Certain Slant of Light
The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Brown Girl in the Ring
Well Wished
The Innkeeper's Song
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Beloved
American Indian Myths and Legends
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Return of the King
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers


C S Peterson's favorite books »
Showing posts with label Poems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poems. Show all posts

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Today I am a Small Creature


This evening I was looking at the photo of Saturn hanging above my son's desk as he did his homework.  You can see our home if you look carefully.  Earth is a small blue dot, second ring in from the outside, in the upper left of the photo.



Today I am a small creature 
wandering in wonder
on the thin crust
a mere mote of dust
brushed by a wisp of air,

a creature teacher
wanting wonder to awake
waiting in the wake of time
to see if what I though was fine
will root and grow.

What arrows are there
that I can throw ahead
to say when I am dead
such a one was here?

None I fear
when I turn and see what was cast
I throw my present like water
on fires of long past,

only an echo 
of one mother, no other
two hundred thousand
years ago.

Her faint call
encodes the thread
the weft that powers the web
echoes off each cell wall.

Will her long line
throw forward in space
find out new place
be unbroken by time?

Saturday, September 22, 2012

And Mars Just Sits There


I stay up late at night
worried about how 
I may have been judged
cataloguing my faults
worrying at the ones
I haven’t counted yet
but may well be counted by
others who can see them
so easily since they can 
so easily observe me 
from the outside

And roiling over 
in social disjointed 
image soaked media
till all hours
just to avoid 
the laundry
till I’m nauseous with tag lines

And then Mars just sits there
the little rover, far from home
just sits there on Mars
where all that was 
has passed away

where the rock
the sun
the wind
the dust
just there
uncaring

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Wallowing


Death’s touch today wrung out every heart
that comes within the compass of my own
and dumb I stood, lacking any art
that sympathies to sorrow could have shown

Pouting to myself, I cast a cloud
Selfish as a Jonah, badly used
brooding on my future in a shroud
all self pity happily excused

Though, soon as I had called, some comfort came
I shrugged it all away as if t’were naught
numbed myself in habit’s drudging shame
shunning tenderness so dearly bought

A robin winked at me one eyebrow cocked
to think I wept ‘cause time could not be stopped