my life source and sustainer is Jesus Christ

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Fredericksburg, Virginia


 Living Here

The Muleshoe Salient is still imprinted on the land in the fields and woods
of Spotslyvania Courthouse.  The mounds of dirt they dug
in haste for cover
are low now and covered with moss, twigs,
grasses nibbled on by the deer and rabbits.

Longstreet Drive, Jackson Street, Ewell Lane,
new roads with token names, a nod to what?  Restless dreams
and flags. 

Layer after layer of fall leaves laid in now cover the dead.
Curried golf courses and battlefields mowed every fall. 

Chancellorsville, First Day, preserved.

The scrub woods that was the horror
of Wilderness has grown up.
It veils new subdivisions hidden back in the woods. 
Stories float among us of misty dawn ghost soldiers in the road
I half believe them.

In the fall the shadows get longer,
the sky bluer.   Visitors come here to remember a few days in May.
Like the deer and moss and new trees,
living on mostly we forget. 

photo by Susan Krieg

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

small poem

       Grinding exactitudes
       parsing ever finer
       flowering outward with smaller
       and smaller branches
       until meaning
       is lost.

pastel sketch for the next painting    
 
sketching on Washington Avenue in Fredericksburg, VA

Friday, October 2, 2015

poem


Driving the highway home
at night from Washington, DC
to Fredericksburg,
the heavy traffic snakes in the dark
along on unseen paths.
Northbound, a diamond necklace of headlights,
and southbound poured out like rubies
on a blanket of black velvet.

Day time around town
I see the cars like pooh sticks
flowing under the overpasses. 

In my bedroom
when its really quiet,
two am, awake,
staring at the clock I can hear it,
trucks grinding, the low constant hum,
a river with insomnia.