Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
Shower the world with crackling leaves,
Dead and limp before but now firm
From frozen dew, this ground your signal
To the creatures you watch in the night.
Shower the broken places with jangles
Of icy prairie grass and let the spring thaw
Spark life never imagined, never believed
In the time of winter’s locked prison.
Shower me with kisses melting hours
Apart, reclaiming late winter sun
When we walked along a silent river
And I saw how you had changed my life.
for Ken
–Shaun Perkins
We 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”
The first place I looked was where the spring rounded the grove of oaks and began to widen into a creek shadowed by sycamores. The moss grew thick on the bare spots of earth where the sun only reached in winter speckles between branches. It spread across the rocks—outcropped on the edges of the creek and sunk into the bank sloping up to a path the deer and raccoon spent their lives making. Continue reading “Arrival”
You lie on the naked bed, the sheets
Finishing the spin cycle, the trailer walls
Shuddering slightly with the motion.
One cat is at your feet, the others
Line the rooms like Egyptian statues
On guard for a dropped piece of cheese. Continue reading “After October Rain”
Is this a dream or not, I’ll say
Sitting in the dark
With a magazine in my hand
And the harmonica on the floor
By my socks
The war outside continues
Constant crashing, breaking
The drip, drip of the melting icicles
As they fall softly to the ground
To the snow
Put on your boots and go outside
Crash Continue reading “Down the Road”
1.
The frog at night
Is not alarmed to be spotlighted
Or at least does not scamper
But merely poses
For the shot Ken takes,
The first of a series
That highlights the frog Continue reading “Me and Ken and Two Animals”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 