April 3, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Spring Morning”

Posted on April 3, 2018 by Leslie Schultz

Spring Morning

To approach the poem at the end of your mind
you must keep walking through this new-fallen,

savage-but-sweet April snow. It is, after all,
National Poetry Month all month long, and you

just need to keep going through milky pre-dawn
darks, across the ghostly outline of the labyrinth

to the west of the house, moving without tracks,
without startling the young rabbits grazing

on frost-stiffened grass or halting the rapturous
circling of eagles coursing over black waters

like sails of windmills. Dare to cross over
the Cannon River’s thinnest sheen of renewed ice

on a bridge of concrete and milled steel, knowing
that these cantilevers of form will carry you forever

toward the setting sun at dawn, will guide you
gently, inexorably, down

toward all that waits tangled, unfurled,
glittering but (as yet) unborn.

Leslie Schultz

Thanks to the reader who pointed out yesterday’s missing link to the poem, “A Jar of Buttons,” by Ted Kooser. I have added it to yesterday’s post, and it is also HERE. One of the books I am most looking forward to reading is Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Kit published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Check out other participants in the NaPoWriMo Challenge!

Until tomorrow, Leslie

April 2, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Fate”

Posted on April 2, 2018 by Leslie Schultz

Fate
for Pablo Neruda

A small hole has opened
beneath my foot,
in the dense woven black
of my cotton sock.

I see startled whiteness—
my granular skin,
clean as a peeled
winter onion.

I skin off the sock
with its tiny new eye,
converse of growth
on white potatoes.

I think to fling it
wherever things go,
worn out of service,
imperfect now;

but, seeing my fingers
bearing their marks—
alluvial strata
of weather and woe—

wound round the toe
of the aged sock,
this moves me to find
a spool of black,

to seek a sleek steel,
(slender remedy)
to thread its clear eye.
To blink. To retry.

Leslie Schultz

I have been thinking a lot about socks lately, as I knit along on a new one most days. Yesterday, I discovered a hole in a (mass-produced) sock I was wearing, and that led to this poem. After I wrote it, I thought of two favorite poems, this one by Pablo Neruda, and then this one by Ted Kooser–with clear evidence that his spare style is appreciated in China!