Twelve wild turkeys on their barnyard tour lumber from the woods
Category: Poem
Original poems by Ellen Symons
This hush
Late-winter evening, a light snow, ...
When he was a little boy … Elliott’s 15th-birthday poem
Every year, our friend Elliott gets a poem for his birthday. Here is this year's, along with an audio version.
August Rain
The year has turned
to the round month,
the orange one,
month of steam and droning bees,
time when we first remember
the end is tumbling near. ...
Un-fragment
rising through layers of dream / light / shadow mattress body blanket groping for the fragments strewn by night across the landscape of my bed pulling thread by thread knitting myself together as day breaks ~~~
Sadness, I instruct you
For my dear friend And now, sadness, I instruct you to be still. Let these bones rest. Marrow pale and depleted by memory and forgiveness, they are weary and cannot stand your shaking. Let the exhausted heart encased in this bombarded cage beneath my skin jarred by your gnashing and clamouring float in the buoyancy … Continue reading Sadness, I instruct you
Five Reasons to Love the Long Nights of Winter
This poem is one I wrote maybe a decade ago, but it still expresses something important to me about the beauty, peace, and comfort of this time of year.
After a bright afternoon’s quickening light
To be cradled by dusk,
Its slowly sit-down darkening
To contemplate the softening outline of the old cat
Curled warm on your grey-trousered lap
To watch the women and men with briefcases and backpacks
Walk from the bus toward darkened houses
To see a glow appear here or there and know
The tired homecomings have begun
To unravel the mysteries of your heart
That can only be glimpsed when the busy sun
Pulls up its thick shadows
And the arms of the evening encompass all
____________________
Ark
All night the wind filled with snow howls against our walls. What happens to the animals, or people still outside I do not know. Small ship on a vast ocean our house sails alone through the gale. Carries us fretting to the borders of morning, the furnace and the radio land ahoy. ~~~
With its secret dances
Come in, with your body and its whispered dreams I will not breathe a word come in, bring its needling anguish, its yokes and shackles, the chains and burdens that make it stumble its tears that stream without permission bring in your body with its fine, secret dances in meadows and under full moons the … Continue reading With its secret dances
One by one,
One by one, winter lifts its long fingers from the deep freeze where they have grown, collecting crystals month by month with its diamond file sharpens them precisely then slips out to test an edge on the skin of our necks and back it goes sitting in the shimmering dark wearing the glimmer of a … Continue reading One by one,
