Retired judge and Ex-director of Homeland Security issue urgent warning ...

River Rocks

 River rocks rolled,

current-rubbed, grit-buffed, &

for now in this garden

hans ostrom 2024

Brown Rabbit in a Meadow

 

Rabbit, still as stone.

in profile--one brown eye stares.

chewing jaws move, work.

hans ostrom 2024

In Times of Fire

I looked at photographs

of a California wildfire. One
showed remnants of a house--
scorched black beam lying
down. In the background,

black pine trunks stripped
of limbs. Foreground: ash
and a clothes dryer & a clothes
washer, side by side, leaning
on each other, their doors
melted off. They looked

back at me like vacant
eye sockets. In the past
they churned and spun
garments a family wore
as they laughed, ate,
quarreled, slept. In this

present, a cyclone of fire
struck them, vaporized
their dwelling. Now they
seem to gaze blindly
into a hellish future.

hans ostrom 2024

For One Night Only

I dreamed books,

the pulp and paper kind,

floated overhead like circling

birds. They

opened and words

tumbled out, came down

like dandelion seeds.

I grabbed what words

I could and put them

in a pail. At home

I dumped them

onto a table,

arranged them

into lists and phrases,

sentences, paragraphs . . . .

I cooked and ate, washed up,

spoke prayers into empty

silence, got in bead, read a book,

and fell asleep knowing I'd never

have the book-dream again. 

Hans Ostrom 2024

Sadhguru debates in London

"Pied Beauty," by Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Lovely But Lonely," Roger Illsley

Rex Tillerson on Trump (from the video, "Trump Experts Speak Out")

"dog," by Charles Bukowski

Superstitions

If you shed some, they seem

ridiculous but dear,
like that paisley garment
you wore long ago. Spill

salt, toss some over
your left shoulder. Express
hope, knock on wood. Avoid
seams between sidewalk
blocks. Lucky underwear,
coin, pen, numbers? Soon

superstitions amass drifts
like snowflakes & your mind
gets stuck, so let a factual
sun melt some away. You'll

feel like you just moved
to a fresh new town. Until
you spill salt on the new table.

hans ostrom 2024

She's Making Changes

So I'm dropping off my weekly

sack of canned food & baby formula
to a food bank when
an older woman pushing
a shopping cart stops to declaim:

"I'm changing my name
and my birthday," she says,
her speech not hampered
much by missing teeth. "Two
years ago on my birthday,
I got hit in the face with a baseball
bat. This year on my birthday,
I got hit by a U-Haul truck."

I want to ask what new name
she's chosen and maybe the fresh
birthday but instead say,
"That's terrible," one of my go-to
expressions of sympathy. She
scowls and says, "I know it's
terrible. You think I'm an idiot?"
"No, ma'am," I say, and scamper
with my bag toward the food bank.

hans ostrom 2024

Carbon-Neutral Dreams

Around midnight, I look outside

and see small solar lamps in the garden
glow. Daytime, the lamps
stuff a little sunlight in their pouches,
which at night they empty.

Soft and unassuming, the light
massages flowers and stones.
Seeing the lamps stirs some hope in me--
not much, but these days even
some is welcome. i stumble

back to bed to sleep and,
like solar lamps, to release soft
neural light into carbon-neutral dreams.

hans ostrom 2024