npm2020: poetry videos day 20 "Cauldron Full of Compost"

My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.

Today's poem is the first in a series for Earth Week. It's the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on Wednesday, and I'll be sharing some poems like this one, with some extra-earthy themes.  Also possibly my longest poem...

Cauldron Full of Compost I’m raking for dollars when I find it— my red kindergarten lunch box, buried deep under leaves and tangled ivy between the playhouse and the herb garden. I guess plastic really does last forever. I fixed a lot of food in this lunch box: boiled summer cauldrons full of onion-grass spaghetti, mixed pans of mudluscious spring brownies, scooped great heaping mountains of snow cream sprinkled with sugar, garnished with icicles. And once, on Uncle Mark’s birthday, I filled it with oozing mulberries and tiny wild strawberries tossed with encourage-mint. Everyone ate that for real. Who knows what I last cooked in here? Now nature’s doing the brewing: a dark sludgy soup, a decomposing mess of dead plants laced with worms. A few of the leaves are new enough— I can tell which are walnut, tulip, maple— But most have moldered here so long they’re part of the primeval stew. I stir it with a wooden spoon gone greenish with moss, drag up a dripping clump, spread it wetly at the foot of the maple, richer and thicker than syrup. With this dead soup I feed the tree.

npm2020: poetry videos day 16 "Stop for Horses on Bridge"

My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.

Today's poem does not include white-tail deer like the Progressive Poem does, but it IS about horses.
If you faithfully expect something, does it come?

STOP FOR HORSES ON BRIDGE

I stopped for horses

on the bridge—

looked up and down the pebbled path

for steamy velvet muzzles,

listened for the clatter-clop

of horseshoes on the boards.

I stopped for horses

on the bridge—

waited for a whiff of hay and stable,

planned to lay my hand against

a rounded wall of horse.

I stopped for horses

on the bridge—

but horses never came.

npm2020: poetry videos day 9 "Inventing the Tactoscope"

My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.

Today's is a poem of imagination, in which I invent a whole new technology for seeking out those tiny spots of yard or skin that somehow have never been touched...

Inventing the Tactoscope Somewhere in my yard there’s a spot, a spot the size of a flickering thought, where no one’s foot has ever walked. Somewhere on my skin there’s an inch, an inch the size of a tiny pink pinch, where no one’s hand has ever touched. I imagine a tool that lets me see the empty cool of those deserted places, that lets me sink with one warm toe into that lonely spot of yard; that lets me lay a fingertip onto that chilly inch of skin. I imagine a tool called a tactoscope.