Monday, August 19, 2024
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Saturday, August 10, 2024
Palms and Paws
He notes that lines cross his hands'
palms like broken hieroglyphs,dried up canals, or lost roads
in a desert. Creases and carvings.
Clues of use. Scars. Upholstery
stiched after the fact. Sometimes,
he thinks, it's nice to hold a cat's
or dog's paw--those plump pads,
cushioning for leaps, lopes,
and sprints. Something sacred--
isn't there?--about palms and paws,
blooms on the stems of evolution,
epidermal note-paper, tiny
meadows of toil and calm.
hans ostrom 2024
Summer Theater
As a bulbous puce spider
sits still in its web waitingfor an insect to stick,
a butterfly bounds through
sunshine, alights to sip water
from a deep green wet leaf.
Bees maul lavendar blossoms.
An iridescent blue dragonfly
cruises by & a hummingbird
pulls up & parks mid-air
to sip nectar from a fire-red
crocosmia flower. Crows
sit on wires, roofs, and branches,
silently picking mites from feathers.
Summer theater, quite show--
I'm glad to see and know it.
hans ostrom 2024
Just Alive
It's midnight, you're standing in a room
looking out at darkness, you'resipping water from a glass,
and you muse: If I weren't thinking
of me, no one in a world of 8 billion
would have me in mind. It's a
pleasant thought--to be on no one's
mind, as unremarkable (and unremarked)
as a weed in a meadow no one visits--
but alive! Just alive.
hans ostrom 2024
Monday, August 5, 2024
Sunday, August 4, 2024
Friday, August 2, 2024
Wednesday, July 31, 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. Oneshowed 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
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