Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Monday, August 26, 2024
Use Your Imagination
Your imagination uses you
when you use your imagination.It's like walking a burly, leash-defying
dog. Like lecturing a cat
about excess leisure time.
Your imagination goes
where it will and then slobbers
on you. It will yawn, lick itself,
curl up, and sleep where you sleep--
and hiss if you try to move it.
hans ostrom 2024
August Fires
Smoke from Canadian fires
apricot the morning light.Asthmatics hope for a wash
of rain or muscled breezes
off the Pacific. August
in the northern half
of our planetary melon
has ritualized fire--
images of charred houses,
cars, schools, towns,
and mountains stomp
steadily into media's flow.
I don't know, I don't know
what to to--what can I do
amdist this burning?
hans ostrom 2024
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
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