By Michael Metivier
The mower alone
saw from the median
the cloud come over
the mountain down to trawl
the valley like a whale
and the swifts like water
passing through her white baleen.
The mower alone patrolling
the haw with the hawks
saw from the median
the cloud come over
the mountain to swallow
where the sky had been
and where the town had been
pinned by steeples
and hummed electric hubris.
For everyone else
on either side of the narrow
the cloud was only a minute
of a single verse
because the highway treats the blues
as all the same as if Bentonia
were Sunflower County
but the land between the lanes
even while under the blades
sees the power in every cloud
and hears each song spiral out
of an old familiar tune just so
to devour our hearts.
Source: Poetry (January 2015)
Poet Bio
More Poems about Nature
Listening in Deep Space
We've always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.
We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers...
At the Equinox
The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars.
I have no theory of radiance,
but after rain evaporates
off pine needles, the needles glisten.
In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon,
and,...
More Poems about Social Commentaries
From the Sky
When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.
Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).
A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).
Teens are writing love...
Poem with Human Intelligence
This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...