two poems

April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate, I’m posting two of my own poems composed in the last year. Each of these poems takes notice of a particular sighting in nature, in the first, a particularly striking sunrise in the trees, and in the second, a barely there evening moon.

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"Library" ~ A Poem by Paul J. Willis

For anyone who has ever felt a special kinship with books and libraries, here is a delightful poem.

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springtime salutations

hello, hydrangea
blooming bright
hello, swallows
sweeping low in flight
hello, clover
soft and sweet
growing green beneath my feet
hello, springtime!

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winter poem

Snowflakes
Out of the bosom of the Air
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft and slow
Descends the snow.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Of Crickets–Crows– and Retrospects

“September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt,
evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.”
- Alexander Theroux, 1981
“Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.”
- [...]

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poem - Mary Oliver

I am officially free from academic responsibility as I finished my last exam yesterday. Mike will be finished on Monday, and we can celebrate together. I reveled in my new freedom last night with some serious browsing in Barnes and Noble, while Mike studied. I nosed in a book of beautifully crafted sermons by Frederick [...]

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Eastertide

This morning’s text was from John 20, an account of the resurrected Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene outside the tomb. At first she thinks he is the gardener, and her mistake is somehow appropriate — a symbol of Eastertide, green and growing things, the resurrection and the life –this Risen Lord.
I found a nice poem [...]

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Leisure

Ran across this poem today. A good thought for early January as daily routines resume.
Leisure
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in [...]

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poem for first snow

Robert Frost’s “The Onset”
Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his [...]

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"October Maples, Portland"

by Richard Wilbur
The leaves, though little time they have to live,
Were never so unfallen as today,
And seem to yield us through a rustled sieve
The very light from which time fell away.
A showered fire we thought forever lost
Redeems the air. Where friends in passing meet,
They parley in the tongues of Pentecost.
Gold ranks of temples flank the [...]

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