And More Poems ...

 Such a pleasure to enter the pages of RockPaperPoem with "The Next Stage of Grief": link here.

I've been having a great time sharing my poem "Rocks," which was the first runner up for the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize -- I flew to San Diego to accept the award and meet some of the other poets.

My moose went with me to the Pacific Ocean.

Rocks

 

In New England, we grow them—harvest them, stack them

along the edges of fields. Good crop? Not bad this time.

After spring’s lines of lavender and late roses

 

half a year of long lament, laid as a line of stones. My life in

widow world: Would he have watched this season’s harvest? Praised

fat tomatoes in a bowl, purple berries, pinecones?

 

He would. So I carry him close, as his spirit snuggles

in my hip pocket, speak his name, sing louder, share a smile.

When night falls, I shoulder silence, dinner for one:

 

which drove me to delve and define “inselberg,”

tongue-tossed by a mining geologist in east Africa seduced

by the Serengeti, where lions hunt from high crags—

 

rock knobs risen through weather and resistance. On my

tongue next, the term “monadnock,” indigenous form for lone

mountain surviving. In New England we live with our past:

 

words absorbed from Abenaki assertion, stones heaped as walls

around our burial grounds. We witness forests reclaim farms.

Find old foundations of granite and grit

 

dark, cold, exhaling radon remnants. I gave my love

a marble marker for his grave, engraved with names. Geology

rasps rough on this rainy evening, looking up

 

igneous, formed from fire, blazing birth of coarse-grained rock

laid down in wide intrusions at this world’s skin. I grasp:

granite grows a wrap of lichens, palest green, rooting

 

in the grains from which the stone steals its name. Words wrestle,

weathered stones subsiding into soil. Widow world wanders,

walking steep slopes; in loss, the gray-green lichens linger.

 

-- BK

 

And if you missed my St. Johnsbury poem "I See  You," you can listen to it again (and read it below the audio part) -- at Gyroscope Review: click here. 

Plus you can both see AND listen to this poem, "TEEN SUMMER," at The Post Grad Journal -- click here.

There, I'm a little bit caught up, and I'll fill you in on summer publications very soon. Thanks for reading along!