(Cabin Sunset, summer 2025)
The Heat of the Moment
Settling into our new mountain cabin,
Dogs and humans equally overheated
In the shadeless August afternoon,
The only way to be is naked.
Stuff strewn around
Bed to one side, kitchen the other,
Camp chairs with panting dogs
On an old Persian rug in-between.
Cabin with unfinished interior
Waits for insulation, paneling and flooring,
But in this moment nothing is missing
Except maybe a fan.
No water we haven’t brought,
Nor power not in some kind of rechargeable battery,
Yet we find a strong signal FM station
Playing one classic rock song after another.
And it takes me back to another time
Living as a 70’s teen in the suburbs when FM was king,
Then in the 80’s as a young man off grid in the hills
When a stack of cassettes was all we had or wanted.
Those youthful times, family and friends are long gone
And yet here I am in old age,
Living the good life again with new family and friends
Still rocking on, out of time, out mind.
(8/10/25)
Categories:
shadeless, mountains, nostalgia, retirement, summer,
Form: Narrative
Perhaps you hail from verdant coastlands,
or from rolling hills blanketed by trees,
or from the lofty perches of the mountains,
or from the banks of some strong river.
And though I was born in marshy coastland,
and have known the comfort of swaddling trees,
and felt my heart surge at the glories of the mountains,
and been hypnotized by the hidden tongue of the river,
my heart was forged in the plains.
Naked to the sky,
daunting and inviting,
stark and raw.
A soul can grow strong there,
where there's nowhere to hide.
Where truth burns like the shadeless beams of sunlight.
The eye that roves the horizon
and finds little there,
must turn instead to the contours within.
Such beautiful, dangerous features
to be found
in the heart.
27 November 2022
Categories:
shadeless, heart,
Form: Free verse
The old women sat in a small circle
under the natural, unnatural,
shade of the Mulberry tree.
Weaving their knits;
a sing-song chatter
rising musically
into the hot Cretian afternoon,
past the children
perched
in the branches above
eating the sweet berries.
Soon,
cold December will arrive.
The old women will hang
silently
the pruned, bare, thin branches
with water-filled bottles
forcing horizontal growth.
The shadeless Mulberry tree
will sing.
As strong, cold winter winds
whistle across the open necks;
a sweet random melody.
Categories:
shadeless, wind,
Form: Free verse
Ludwig Leichart
This perplexing country,
(such an under statement),
where rivers run upside down,
marbles are strewn by the Devil
and Songlines
etched in memory are
sung by those few who know.
Seeking Victoria,
the blazed trees could not help,
the Prussian collapsed, looking at the blue.
Initialled stunted trees showed the way,
signposts to oblivion,
while the heat,
always the heat,
in a furnace of shadeless infinity
dessicates his body.
What use the blaze?
He cannot walk or crawl,
only a palanquin borne by flies,
Oh the flies,
will carry him there
until their wings melt.
He came from the south
humming tunes from a Baroque choir
to reach the Arafura sea,
where Cornish stone -masons build chimneys
to ward of the chill (sarcastic laugh).
and a Tamarind tree guards the entrance.
The red coated soldiers have left
And he, Ludwig had vanished.
A fanfare blasts, .
Is that an angel holding Brown’s hand
up there on top of a nunatak of the desert,
the quavers and semi-quavers merging
in an anthem of despair?
Categories:
shadeless, endurance,
Form: Free verse
Attending to my laments,
reading a poem to myself
I could not foresee an incoming missile.
*
How could you change the world
when a black and white magpie
writes the script of life ?
*
A god once told me
in whispers, he wants to
die in the shadeless sun.
Satish Verma
Categories:
shadeless, art,
Form: ABC
Tell them
-They have come
To the fishless sea;
Needless is their net and
chums,
Useless! Their gaff and clonks.
Tell them
-They have come
To the metal land;
Where tilling is a waste,
And planting is unseen.
Tell them
-They have come
To the shadeless tree;
Where resting is unpleasant,
Where sun is in abundance.
Tell them
-And Sing to them
A single song;
Sing to them
Their failure!
Categories:
shadeless, metaphor
Form: Imagism
Serenade, softness, and silhouette
Long-ago summer days would bring,
Before and after the bright sunset,
Limpid and languid and lingering.
I remember the crickets' castanets,
Coral clouds and grass still damp with rain.
Solitude then held no regrets;
Beauty was never marred by pain.
The thought of parting seemed as far,
When the liquid light lapped everything,
As night itself on the first dim star,
Silvery, seemingly slumbering.
Through shadeless hours of hot dry light,
Immersed in the present, I might forget,
But in the chill of the sudden night
Twilight from far away haunts me yet.
Categories:
shadeless, nature, nostalgia,
Form: Rhyme
Hindermost thru the bluemoon,
The shadeless empty bluemoon,
(The beloved- hollow bluemoon,)
Rememerbing, a gliding fowl,
The clouds of wings of darkness,
White darkness, the worries,
Tasteless darkness--weeping,
On the farside the kingdom doom,
Overland of unknown,
We hold you in our minds eye,
Utter to me the with your last breathe,
Tender words will be relished, yet lost.
Categories:
shadeless, introspection,
Form: I do not know?