Frank Chance - Google Image
Letting go - greeting risk
Still seeing far beyond
To free a flightless soul
To run or to stay today
Answering each heart
With certainty and love
Called forever real by all
Calmed by breeze of trust
And played by faceless hands
Beyond life's changing veil
What lives beyond these legs?
Past this velvet poker board
Google Images
The wind is always such a big presence
Even though it isn’t always around us
When it is, it easily colors our world
With the broad brush of its personality
Sometimes it is dry, warm and inviting
Proving playful through its leafy rustle
As it turns the underside of each leaf up
On a cottonwood tree at the same time
To change each living tree's summer dress
From a bluish-green to a yellowish-white
Threatening rain but promising mischief
When the same wind visits here in winter
It howls hollow through cottonwood trees
Bare branches brown and brittle over-head
Those winter winds often chase snow or rain
Through a dark and leafless winter landscape
Wind can tear off tarnished autumn leaves
Or rapidly chatter spring’s new leafy growth
And a busy wind can always find its place
Inside every season’s melody as it plays
Google Images
I wonder what you called me
When you saw me watching you
There, where you were wading
Hunting for the fish that swam
Unsuspecting the grip of your bill
But I watch a heron every day
Fishing on the river by my work
Every day it wades to catch fish
But only when tides are just right
So the water is shallow and fish linger
That heron knows I am there
But it hardly matters by now
He is the only predator around
I am just a bystander, watching
As that heron hunts for its fish
But here in the wilderness I hide
As you fumble half-minded in your task
Surviving on the fish you catch
While you avoid entangling my shadow
As it brings a certain threat to you
But I want neither you nor your fish
As you draw down your large wings
And pull two scaly feet from the mud
Up into the blue shadow of your wings
And seek another place to fish
Google Image
Alder trees found their place
At the margin of the forest
In front of the grand firs
Above the sword ferns
That circle the trunks
And hide round rocks
Rolled or lifted aside
From an old dirt trail
That follows the forest edge
Beyond the comfortable space
Where I learned that I belong
Google Images
Where did you come from?
Silky weaves high in tall trees
Caterpillars devour their platforms
So leafy skeletons of fallen leaves
Can litter dry ground around trees
That needed them for something
Carnage of awkwardly bent bugs
Caterpillar ends severed by birds
Strewn randomly across the path
All Shouting that life is not casual
Whether it flies, crawls or stands
Life’s beauty is not measured by time
It burns bright in the crawling insect
Just as surely as it does in flying birds
And in the young stand of Alder trees
I watch them all through my own window
And where will you go from here?
Google Image
Time wills to chase us through life
Pushing here and then waiting there
Wishing and longing at the bottom
Forgiving and laughing at the top
Often drawing us away from others
I have dissolved into others before
But never forgot my efforts to please
Folding myself into mothers and brothers
Two melting pots of love and longing
Flickering butterflies of their own passions
Flashing here and there to their own flowers
Until I didn’t notice them any more
All that was left in bloom was me
And the rest didn’t matter anymore
Because my vessel has always carried
Inside of it, all the love I can ever feel
