Just
as day starts fading
night draining
the sky of light
a red throated hummingbird
whirrs in
sipping the cosmos
blooming just for me
Rayn Roberts
Category: Birds
Sleep Deprivation
What have you done, little grey wing
Flown the dark Atlantic to Cordoba
Heard the poetry of Lorca
Stolen a song of some ruiseñor
Returned with them swelling your breast?
Again, to the moon’s full glow
Accompanied by crickets, the songs
Filter through the lemon tree.
The mockingbird awakens me.
Mystery
Sometime before the land turned away from light
The wind in the wild mustard slowed
The sun, being where is always is, the moon too
Twilight and moonrise were in me.
Something small and quick sprang and ran.
The long grass bent as I watched the urge to chase
Corner and kill rise and fall inside me.
A hawk tucked wings, stooped from a great height
Was high in the air again, a ground squirrel in its claws–
The life of a large snake touched me, I watched
From grass to rock, sand on the road to sage
I heard the dry hiss where a lizard whipped out.
The serpent, licking the air with a pronged tongue
Coiled under a cactus tree, sang a warning–
This was no tree of knowledge, the rattler
Untouched by good or evil, is pure, perfectly pure.
I closed my eyes, sound and light opened the third eye
I saw a human face, half gleaming reptilian green
Half clear compassionate blue– There were no words,
No thought, I moved forward and became that face.
女の子が折り紙を作る
A Girl Makes Origami
I sit before the blank page
Of the soul
Waiting to fill it each day
I fold minutes into hours
And poems
I fold dreams into cranes
I dare say
And let them fly away…
I Create Heaven
I Create Heaven
For a little chickadee
Feeding from
A blissful pile
Of premium wild seed
And though it
Never heard it
From a book
Of holy words
I am the God
Of small brown birds.
Rayn Roberts
2/25/17
To My Mexican American Neighbors
The long hours of your drinking are now the short hours of my sleep.
Sleep covers me with black sheets
but your latino voices startle my ears.
I would cry out the window, ¡Cállate!, but civility prevents me.
So amigos, I still up with you
Hearing the riot of your banter
Pretending I’m a writer.
Have you so many considerations keeping you from calm dreams
Or is it a lady that stirs you
Keeping your tongues wagging
into the moonlit morning?
It is true, the young believe they will live forever, talk forever
Of conquest, business and love
Yes, they will live forever
But will they learn to love their neighbor?
I am not so old, but tonight I am in an old man’s body
With an old man’s longing for peace
Wishing I could sleep, sleep forever
While beyond my window
A mockingbird laughs at me, the moon falls to the west
Falling as I should be, word by word, laugh by laugh, into dreams.
Politics: Is for the Birds
The right wing and the left
Are pitted so fiercely
against each other
It’s scarin’ me
half to death,
Some talking civil war,
others revolution–
Politics
is for the birds:
An eagle needs
two wings to fly, there’s
Too much tweetin’ goin’ on!
