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"Bermuda Moon," by Roger Illsley

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𝐊𝐞𝐢𝐫𝐚 𝐊𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐇𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐝 - 𝐓𝐄𝐋𝐋 𝐌𝐄 𝐈𝐅 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐍𝐀 𝐆𝐎 𝐇𝐎𝐌𝐄 [𝐎𝐫𝐢...

Word Woman

She stayed open to words

any day of time or night. Sang
words if they wanted thrumming,
mumbled humbled ones, bathed
others in black ink. Words

were people in her mind. Without
them she couldn’t imagine the
something she might be.
Come in, come in, she said when
they arrived. She fixed a place

for each, knew most of their
morphological needs. They
knew they might denote, connote,
obscure, shade, or just freely lie
around, lying, telling truth,

cursing coarsely, moaning
hoarsely, leaping into phones
to ride electrons in the clouds.
Toward words she truly
tried to act the perfect hostess.

hans ostrom 20

Freight Ships

 Tacoma, Washington, USA

Anchored, freighters look like farm towns
burning necessary lights on dark fields.

Their crews, like miners, are unapparent.

We know these ships to be steel buckets,
as basic as water, profit, gravity, and greed.

We do not know why we stare at them

like art or why they  stare back
with the wise vacancy of cats.

hans ostrom 2024

© 2 days ago   

"Hey, Renee (A Christmas Song)," by Roger Illsley

"Words and Music," by Roger Illsley

If It Hits the Ground

 Words on the side

of a groaning recycling truck:
IF IT HITS THE GROUND,
IT HITS THE SOUND--
Puget Sound, an adjunct
to the Pacific Ocean, which
is choked with plastic.

Studying for an advanced
degree in futility, I pick up
as much as I can. Black forks.
Cracked food containers Massive
clear cups. Straws, spoons, bits,
shards, pieces. Tossed from cars.
Thrown down in parking lots.

Debris from mass insanity, is
what it is. Evidence of lethal
indifference. Effluvia of the
Consumocracy. We, the ones
named the persistence of
the fittest (not the strongest),
make ourselves unfit for our
only niche, Earth. If it hits the
ground it hits

a drain, a creek, a culvert,
a ditch, a river, a lake, a Sound,
an ocean, a sea. See? See.

hans ostrom 2024

Vienna

 (1980)

1980

How the fuck did I get here? I asked myself.
By train, dummy. Winter. Yes, yes: opera,
history, magnificence, Sigmund. A big so what?
to all of that and more when you're thin

on money, low on rest, and wracked
by mistakes you made. Back "home,"
they'd elected Reagan president. That, children,
was a point of no return. Austria is

of great historical importance. Okay, fine,
but I'm hungry, I thought. So I went out,
and I went out, and I found myself a cafe,
which featured a kind of importance I

required--hot food and wine, buzz of
customers, glowing lights and cigarette
smoke, a blond woman with a wry
smile, and a sense of proportion.

hans ostrom 2020/2024

You Are Here

 YOU ARE HERE

say maps in museums,

parks, and zoos. You

let your fretting mind

go too far out today.

It strode out on a road

to imagined disaster.

It shook its fist

at doom clouds

overhead. It didn't

let your lungs

take a single easy

breath. Bring it back.

Arm in arm, walk

your mind to a settled

space. A present place.

Make it rest. Let it

look at ground or

stones or grass

right in front of it.

In your body, mind.

In your mind, body.

Tell body, tell it:

YOU ARE HERE.

hans ostrom 2024

Terse Ballad

Hello, you.

Entrez vous.
Look so fine.
Want some wine?

I've spent years
trapped in fears.
How 'bout you?
You seem blue.

Your eyes glisten.
I will listen.
Talk some more.
You don't bore.

Friends so long,
right or wrong.
Stay here, do.
I'll cook for you.

The world's bad:
Why we're sad.
Here you are,
come so far.

Think of how
to survive Now.
Later waits,
dealing fates.

Sure, let's hug.
I'm a lug.
Let's kiss, too.
Me and you.

hans ostrom 2024

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Birds at Twilight

A black murmuration

of starlings surged like a pepper
storm, shifting shapes
against a pallid blue sky at dusk.

And a slow
procession of flying crows
crossed just above
us, a little crowd of corvids

flapping casually
toward a roost in a fir tree.
We wondered
about the hedge sparrows

hunkering down,
and where do juncos nest?
At twilight, birds
move. They migrate from

light to dark.
We find we're rewarded
when we watch
them as often as we can.

hans ostrom 2024

"Lighthouse," by Roger Illsley (Lyrics: Hans Ostrom, Music: Roger Illsley)

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Wind Advisory

No, a "wind advisory" does

not mean a meteorologist
makes suggestions to wind
about its breezy business.

Here it means driven winds
coming East off the volcanically inclined
Cascade Mountains into easily
offended Puget Sound,

which usually hosts Pacific
winds from West, warm. Something
tonight will rattle, bang, or both
outside this dwelling. We

never can predict what. We'll
listen to the ragged rhythm,
the knocks and ticks, not get
up, wake to debris-filled dawn.

hans ostrom 2024

Reflected Reflections

Lamplight ricochets

off a bit of foil, enters
two eyes, appears in a
brain, in a mind.

Sunlight softly shines
through and on a window,
where two eyes see
themselves in a failnt face.

Here are mirrors and eyes,
illuminated blindness. Skies.
Wet heat in a gleaming greenhouse
rises. A reflecting mind apprises.

hans ostrom 2024

Global🌎 Clean up your church before you come for our school

"For Librarians," by Hans Ostrom

Undocumented immigrants pay $96 Billion in taxes per year

Seagul, Hawk, and Here We All Are

In a pounding but warm rainstorm,

I dropped off the weekly sack
of canned foot to the food bank
run by a church. A seagull
landed on the church's big cross
and shrieked. Translation?

"I like water!" or "Praise the
feathered Lord!" or "I'm a gull
and I like to scream!" On the way
home I spied a hawk sitting
in a gentelemanly way on a
power-line, watching cars go
by, waiting for an unwary squirrel
or the evening rabbit commute.

Yes, well, here we all are,
traveling another one of our days.

hans ostrom 2024

Angry, salty and nsfw!

Bravo

The Limits of Anxiety

Anxiety feel like breathless

pressure in the chest,
a fluttering suddely of crazed
birds. Anxiety morphs
into dread, shakes the bars
of its cell for help.

Low charcoal clouds
move in, park just above
the head, which wants
to love hope but can't.

Anxiety's gaze wants
to weld itself to a dark pit,
a kind of sick security.

But it is nothing, anxiety
is nothing compared to what
the tortured imprisoned,
the constantly bombed and
displaced, must feel always,
even as they sleep, if they sleep.

hans ostrom 2024

Donald Trump is Who America Is

From Time to Time

The phrase "from time to time"

makes my mind see stepping stones

set wide-apart. Circles of light

on stages. Old pulpy catalogues

and sports newsprint pages,

imploded miners' shacks, 

and burial mounds, retired profs

(strangers now on what they'd thought

of as "their" campuses) taking

hard steps into a library. "From

time to time" makes me sad,

forlorn, and blue--but glad

to be alive today though feeling still

a chill on back and shoulders as Earth

spins me toward my personal last time. 

hans ostrom 2024

Without Shadow

My shadow left me for a day.

It joined a general shade.
In sun I looked down on the walk
In vain to find a silouette made.

Without my shadow, I felt sad
And wondered did I still exist?
Did light sail through my body now?
Was I insubstantial as a mist?

My shadow, it returned at last
And soldered itself to me.
My shadow proves my substance, yes--
It places and displaces--see?

hans ostrom 2024

Northern Hemispheric November

Oh, November--

my bête noire,
cabinet of cold rain,
sinister capitan of snow,
avant garde of Winter,
tree-stripper, soil-sealer,
gloom-injector, glum puritan.

Oh, November, neither
enemy nor friend, just a
doom-inducer, a sour neighbor,
a moldy blanket, a day-cutter,
a sun-shrouder: you
are a head-cold kind of month.

hans ostrom 2024

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"To Put One Brick Upon Another," by Philip Larkin

"The Composer," by W.H. Auden

"The Waning Moon," by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lead the Way

Take my hand, draw

me to your warmth.
Show me what you
want me to want.
Unconfuse me. Simplify,
eye to eye. I'm so tired
of being supposed to know.

So show what you know
I want, what you want.
Clearly you know. You know
clearly. Into your warmth I go--
a room, a place, a bed, a world,
a dream with walls and pillows,
perfume, talk, and linen. So
take my hand.

hans ostrom 2024

Puerto Rican U.S. Army Veteran SLAMS Vile Madison Square Garden Remarks ...

Fathers

Receiving

Tried receiving, not

broadcasting. Sat next
to a tree, took in
a breeze, leaf rustle,
taps and clicks
of shoes passing,
my lungs & heart
pumping. Walked

in a crowd as No One.
Among bodies, felt
the muscle, bone, fat
flow of fabricked bodies,
dances of passing, jostling,
slipping-bay, stop-starting.

Engines, motors, voices,
glass reflections, smoke,
all of it as it was, just
itself, not a message,
just signals received.

hans ostrom 2024

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Who We Are

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Health

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Bystander

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Old Barn

Smell of sun-baked, cured,

unpainted boards. Aromas
of hay and horse manure.
Shiny tines and sweat-dyed

handles of pitchforks.
Massive cured teeth
of an ancient rusted harrow,
retired now, host to spiders.

Fat raindrops tick against
an iron roof. Under eaves
of this hall of harvest
and toil, swallows lay eggs

in mud nests. At dusk
the birds will curve and dip
down for bugs on
a cow-pond surface.

Beyond this heap of rafters
and beams and light-shafts piercing
cracks, the corn and wheat
rustle in heat.

hans ostrom 2024

They Live With Us

For the second year

in a row, a large speckle-legged
spider has anchored a silken thread
on a rain gutter,

and built a languid, relaxed
web anchored below
to a rosemary bush in front
of a large window. She's

an orb-wearver spider--
Neoscona crucifera--found
everywhee around this country.
I like to sit in a chair by the glass
and watch her. She usually perches

somewhere near the central
orb of web, plump and still,
but sometimes plucking silk
like a harpist. Yesterday,

I saw that she had built a snug,
velvety pale egg-sac. A little
purse. She touched it up
like a painter or sculptor.
Fussing with it. What does
she see when she does that?

Later, she'll lay about 1, 000
eggs in it, and it will drop
off the web into the bush,
maybe down into dirt.

She lives with us, and
we, with her. The same
can be said of so many
splendid creatures.

hans ostrom 2024

Among the Trees

In a forest, I rarely
speak to trees. A guest there,
I don't want to interrupt
their conversations.

Pine trees: often
the chattiest, gesturing
with boughs. Oaks
mumble, if that.

Old shaggy cedars
withdraw from gab,
cover themselves
in green resin blankets.

Stern fir trees speak
judgmentally, telling
neighbors to straighten
out their posture.

I think of all the roots down
there, arboreal working class.
They groan, grip rocks,
in darkness mine for water.

hans ostrom 2024