Poetry Breakfast

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

HERONESQUE
by Ray Sharp

We live in the one inch margins
and walk the water’s edge
exchanging private iconographies
that fly ahead on our approach
like great birds with crook’d necks
bent to the invisible weights
that shape their silhouettes
as we cannot measure our burdens
so much as draw their outlines
with willow sticks in river mud
imagining Chinese woodcuts.

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.

Indian Cemetery, Madeline Island Wisconsin
by Ray Sharp

The little church by the south harbor
is long gone, but a few graves remain
in the weeds under the old maple tree.

You can make out some names
on cracked and weathered stones, Cadeau
and Cadotte, French Catholic Chippewas.

They still leave offerings of coins and cigarettes,
the currencies of this world if not the next,
as if they could buy a little precious time.

Ray Sharp lives in the rural, rugged and remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near Lake Superior. He will be the featured poet in the June 2012 edition of Contemporary American Voices, and his debut poetry collection, Memories of When We Were Birds, will be published in 2012. His poems have appeared in many on-line and print journals, and can be seen at http://www.raysharp.wordpress.com.

First Snow
By Ray Sharp

The dogs and I venture into an alien landscape,
Lapland, Siberia, the Martian surface, new snow
like frozen ashes, like dead skin flaking from
the god of all things too cold and forbidding.

Those twenty centuries passed in the shtetls
on the Russian steppes, in the ghettos of Krakow,
Smolensk, L’vav, were nary enough time to
accustom my blood to the profound absence of light.

I crave sunshine, orange juice, olive groves, warm
sand and blue water, and the company of dark-
complected souls who collect the sun’s rays
and reflect them in warm and lively conversation.

On this third day of November, when my world
has turned from green to white, all color drained
like blood from a corpse, I feel like a car spinning
on an icy grade, or skidding toward the ditch.

Ray Sharp lives in the rural, rugged and remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near Lake Superior. He will be the featured poet in the June 2012 edition of Contemporary American Voices, and his debut poetry collection, Memories of When We Were Birds, will be published in 2012. His poems have appeared in many on-line and print journals, and can be seen at http://www.raysharp.wordpress.com.