Poems

The Conqueror

fearAnd I ran for miles
I ran through blackened fields hissing
Below my scarred feet, through dirt roads
Sidelined by progress and the advent
Of the telephone and the cultivated rose
And I ran for being here

We remember
In our bones if not in our behavior,
The struggle inside the web,
The thorn of the hackberry
And the stronger man’s grasp,
Made strong by words
And not by muscle

And I swam too far
I swam out through the river
Til time could not reach me
And the gnats circling
Above the rotting branches
Punctuating every stroke
Finally abandoned me

We remember
Each life blossoming in the new,
The courageous choked in the bully,
The weak reborn in a singer’s lullaby
To the world ever-changing
And never-changing and waiting
To surrender
Its
Hold
On
Fear

–Shaun Perkins

Musings

This World is Open

worldisopenWe have these stories about the perfect place. That first Biblical story of the land of love and fruit created in the image of the fruit-maker, the lover of all things sensory, all things finite and mortal. Potential blossomed on the vines trailing across the garden paths.

Paradise in the stories where people go to find the lost world of hope and opportunity, where the streets glisten with welcome and the seasons adopt the human to nurture through change. Continue reading “This World is Open”

Poems

Intersection

193rd-Admiral 003193rd E. Ave. & Admiral
5:45 p.m., Monday, Jan. 20, 2014

Route 66 feeds into Tulsa here, County Line
Road  to some, where rural exhausts the city,
A passive crossroad, nodding its head
In the early evening, one block south
Of the radiator rising into the sky, round off/on
Button circled in red next to the yellow M,
American monograms so familiar we have thrown
Them into trunks we no longer open. Continue reading “Intersection”

Poems

In Dead Grass

In the field of dead Johnson grass,
The red-winged blackbird landed.
It swayed the desert-colored stalks
With its weight, then held its place.

Like a swollen tick plucked from a dog
Then dropped, it did not move.
From this distance, I could not see
What suspended it there, what attraction.

Continue reading “In Dead Grass”