Category: POETRY
Again, look up “poem” in the dictionary if you don’t recognize the word. Or, better yet, just have a look at what’s here and form your own impressions.
Fish Haiku
Lurking by mangroves,
the snapper explains his name
to shrimp and fingers.
Vegetarian
mullet eats no other fish,
and yet is eaten.
Fearsome fangs belie
the graceful delicacy
of spotted sea trout.
Beloved of snook,
annoyer of bait fishers:
The humble pinfish.
A patch of bottom
comes loose, grows fins, gills and teeth,
bites the unwary.
A cruising tarpon
sucks in what appeared to be
one misguided shrimp.
Fiddler crabs will tempt
banded bandit by pilings;
barnacles are saved!
Finny bayonets
slashing in the morning sun:
spanish mackerel!
Flash, swirl, strike and run:
scalloped silver, pink and white
redfish at sunset.
Pilchards flock in green;
suddenly a snook attacks:
showers of silver!
18 February 2009 – revised 23 September 2023
Ode to October
O Fall, how do I hate thee?
Let me count the ways.
I hate thee for the slaughtered leaves,
sweet green symbols of Spring and Summer,
now brown and dead upon my lawn and drive.
I hate thee for the chilly nights
that make me break my own Green oaths
and burn sequestered carbon to survive
and don the altered fur of other beasts
to replace the pelts we lost to evolution.
I hate the way you celebrate belief
in supernatural nonsense:
ghosts, goblins and demons galore.
I hate thee for the darkness
now descending on the world:
the sun sinks deeper every day.
I’d sooner live on Luna, where
we’d have to burrow underground
and make our own air
but energy is free
and there is no snow.
2019
Zelenskyy’s Tripwire
Native blackberry vines advance
like Putin’s army, fast!
Reaching out a foot a day,
Leaving behind long green feeders,
vulnerable to my gauntleted hands.
HA! I pull you up.
I am more than a match for you every time,
but there will always be a next time
and every time you draw some blood.
You will be here long after I’m gone
unless I resort to Roundup.
2022
Sea Word Sonnets
Sea
smells
from
afar
bring
memories:
mangroved
mud,
salt
marsh,
crabs,
shrimp,
flashing
fins.
Sea
grapes,
cabbage
palms,
phlox,
morning
glories,
spider
lilies,
hot
sand:
this
is
home.
Sea
shells:
like
life,
most
beautiful
in
pieces.
Here,
have
a
piece
of
me!
Sea
breezes
waft
salty
caresses
across
my
face.
But
dark
clouds
promise
rougher
weather.
2022
Little Gasparilla Island
Miles up the crumbling asphalt
I smell the mangroved mud perfume
whispering of mullet, crabs and shrimp
and fish – lord, the fish!
Agile snapper, snook and reds;
Cat- and ladyfish galore.
My fingers tighten on remembered reels.
The boat trip to the Island
wets my face with saline spray.
It dries in the scents of sea grape and palm,
floating in atop a zest of salt
from ever-restless surf shouting
over and over “I am here!”
So am I.
Never so much elsewhere.
2022
Leap!
Atop a jetty rock I stand,
fragile flyrod in my hand,
trying to ignore the surge
that breaks to spray me on the verge.
I need to climb still further out
to cast, but I am filled with doubt:
I hesitate in fear — I freeze
and tremble in the ocean breeze.
Am I too old, my balance lost?
And if I fall, how great the cost?
Is this how I will kick the bucket?
What the hell, I’m fishing! Fuck it!
3 March 2020 originally
After Life
You always thought you would die and then
be resurrected to live again.
Or you lost someone you loved so much
you invented Heaven to stay in touch.
Or you simply refused to believe your soul
could just disappear down some black hole.
Or maybe you chose to believe that spark
would go with your body into the dark.
Or that all your joyous exhilaration
was only part of a simulation.
All wrong. All right. All misconceived.
It matters not what you believed.
It matters not which part you played
in the personal universe you made
from which to learn, with which to touch
the other gods you missed so much.
28 March 2021
More Physics Haiku
Recently I attended a meeting of the CIfAR Quantum Materials program. It was nice to see the old gang and all the new kids! 😉 Naturally, perverse inspiration struck again…
Iron selenium:
Yes, we have some bananas
in the QPI.
de Haas – van Alphen
without a Fermi surface?
Well, it oscillates!
What’s a pseudogap?
We don’t know, but we can see
them in everything!
In between the sheets
of strontium titanate
it’s interesting.
Unsurprisingly,
quantum oscillations are
everywhere we look.
I don’t understand,
but I use the words as if
I knew their meaning.
The Experiment
The Physicist, a lovestruck knight
comports himself with honour
at the tournament Experiment
in hope that Lady Nature,
lovely, chaste, mysterious maiden,
charmed by his heroic deeds,
will twirl with delight and let her gown
slip open briefly to reveal
a glimpse of breast or flash of thigh.
The Chemist is a rogue who cares
only for schemes
to get into the lady’s pants.
The Engineer’s already down
on one knee proposing marriage
and the raising of bright
industrious children
who will make their parents rich.
The Biologist catalogues these
examples of courtship behaviour
while the Psychologist smiles knowingly
and the Philosopher is, of course,
above all this nonsense.
2016
Seductions
The magnanimous animus selects,
smiles in our hearts, gently
parts the inner lips of intellect
and plunges us through each
the other’s oceanic experience.
Minds are chaste and wanton, always open,
wishing to be entered and filled,
to fill and enter and bring forth,
godlike, creations of light.
1989