Small Stone For 27 July 2019

Storks in cloaks of ermine white,
Long-billed and elegant in the bright and stainless glare of noon,
grave and solemn, gone too soon,
Leave naught to mark their progress through the reedy glades
But enigmatic hieroglyphs like signatures upon the shoreline’s page.

Small Stone for 18 January, 2019

The winter sky is azure glazed,
A bowl wiped clean of cloud smudge by the wind.
It would ping like porcelain.

See the wild geese fly.
They pass in straggling flotillas,
Outward bound to far away and someplace else.
Sleek, like white-hulled racing shells they glide,
Long prows black and needle thin,
Wings like oar blades
Sculling through the liquid air.
Hear them cry the stroke.

One day,
I will not stay behind and watch them
Sail away without me,
Off across the watercolor wash of winter sky
Bound for far away and someplace else.
One day, I will follow after.
But not yet.
Not yet.

Small Stone for 22 September, 2018

The sun is still drowsing in bed while the new day, a fuzzy shawl of low grey clouds thrown on over its nightgown, pauses on the threshold of Autumn.  I’m already up and puttering in the kitchen, inadvertently eavesdropping on a mourning dove having a quiet little boohoo on the roof behind the range hood vent pipe . . .

Small Stone For 2 February, 2018

If I spoke with my hands and not my mouth, if my words were framed with graceful gestures and the eloquence of agile fingers, how would I whisper secrets in the shushing darkness? When it is eyes, not speechless ears, that hang on every word, would flirtation be a tango for two hands, and anger jazz and swash like Martha Graham? Would girl talk swirl and flutter through the fingers like a restless flock of sparrows? Could I soliloquize without a mirror?

Small Stone for 19 January, 2018

Perhaps, if we knew a silent unseen thing with claws might swoop down owl-like upon us at any moment, we might live those moments with more mindful care and gratitude.

Small Stone for 16 December, 2017

No mystical phrase to murmur mindlessly until it becomes a series of meaningless sounds.  No beads to occupy the fingers with the counting out of repetitions until a mystical number is reached, with nothing to show for it all but the passage of time.

A ball of yarn in a bowl, blue mist through clear glass.  The fingers move, the thread flows from the bowl, winds snakelike through the hand, is caught up in the needles’ dance, and something useful takes shape.

In the mind’s still pond,
the silver thoughts swim slowly.
The heron chooses.

Small Stone for 3 March 2017

How wonderfully those great blue-grey heron wings row upward over the air, in careful strokes; yet even so, a smoke-grey wingtip lowering upon the outstroke might brush so gently against the heart and leave a tickle of wonder behind, as it rows away across the still blue waters of the sky.

Small Stone for March 27, 2015

A grackle caballero with his long ebon coattails is strutting his stuff before a cluster of admiring grackle senoritas.   Around him, slender green feelers are poking hesitantly through the thatch of last years grass, testing the air for sunshine.

Small Stone for February 29, 2012

In the glow before sunrise, a small flock of mourning doves roosts on the wires, their silhouettes like antique quarter notes as they write the score for a strange dawn melody.

Small Stone for November 28, 2011

Under a dripping sky,  a fidget of sparrows forages through the grass beside the wet elephant sidewalk.