CARBON CYCLE
by Ray Sharp

About the things we burned.
The leaves we gathered
so many brittle memories
raked into poem piles
we lit
and oh how they caught
and burned
signal fires on hilltops
dispatches from the front lines
tactical maneuvers
casualty reports
little pyres
clean down to ash
that turns a grey mud
in the season’s first cold rain.
Some things are meant to be burned.
Some deserve
the necessary fires that purge
and release
the magic of pencils and diamonds.
With the scent of strawberry and smoke in your hair
I could love you still more.


Ray Sharp writes about the place he knows best, the Western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His poems have appeared in dozens of on-line and print journals. Ray’s chapbook, Nothing Abides, was published in 2011 and his first full-length collection, Memories of When We Were Birds, will be available before the end of 2012. Ray blogs at raysharp.wordpress.com

Advertisement