Birds
Trusting the invisible
They have made a vehicle of the wind,
Flying fast over thigh high reeds
Gliding high now above the warmth of furrowed fields,
They plunge through tons of sky like wild star stones
Landing on leaves.
Their voices fill the day space
With music.
Messengers of passion,
They sing the names of lovers:
zie
zie zie
Sue Sue
Sue
raaa
raaa
raaa
Bar ba Bar ba
Bar ba
ni
ni
ni
Tooo Tooo
Tooo
BECKY Becky
Becky Becky Becky Becky Becky
They know your need
They call your lover in the wind.
- Ray
Herles
Voices International, Spring, 1989 v 24:1
The Tree Cemetery
After the plot lines were drawn,
they came in orange trucks and trailers,
dressed in orange jumpsuits, with their names embossed;
with great buzzing saws:
they cut you down in hours.
Only the stumps remain, bleeding
sap, a kind of weeping.
The canopy of leaves
that transduced sunlight into sugar: Gone
branches that held birds and beetles: Gone.
I hear them on the hill, now,
shaking you out by the roots
with giant clawed, machines,
beeping, beeping, backward as they go
and extract you like a tooth
from the earth you held in place.
- Ray
Herles
Ray Herles, a member of the New Jersey Poetry
Society, lives in Flemington where he works as a psychologist.
Points South
For me the shore starts
in a green station wagon.
The parkway is dark.
I am in the back seat,
the one that faces
what falls behind;
Headlights
shoot by like stars
and sink in the night.
My mother is driving.
The road hums under our feet.
I haven't learned yet
that sometimes the ocean is nothing
but a body of fists
or that all waves
end up breaking.
I just know my mother is driving,
and I can't wait.
-John Smith
Lived Like A Saint
Last summer I lived like a saint.
I didn't work, learned thrush,
and walked barefoot among bees.
I left a moth tugging at a web
for the spider
and split my garden with the weeds.
Crows barked in the hickories.
They could have been clarinets.
It was all music to me.
They played a song about compost,
perched a grey and shaggy limb
and waited for my bread.
Part cicada, part katydid,
heartbeat and drone, the days plodded by,
or whirred like hummingbirds,
a trace of basil in the wake of their wings.
I couldn't tell the stars from fireflies.
I heard lunaria sing.
-John Smith
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