Spring Haiku
I’m optimistic;
like a brand new tennis ball,
everything’s chartreuse.
The brook trout’s belly
is like a sunset I saw;
its stipples the stars.
Papa bear’s hungry.
He tests his weight on the bough.
I’ll need more bird-seed.
The calf on the grass,
steaming in the morning sun,
totters lankily.
Indolence; or, A Dude on Vacation
With last night’s fun like fog within his head,
on sunny deck, encased in house’s lee,
Franklin’s Autobiography he read—
or tried to read, over his black coffee,
but laid down on the toast-warm wood instead.
Summer Dreams
Before the full brunt of the night had settled
the warm smoke slithered like a snake on the grass.
I was sitting at a table of metal,
which held a pencil, a book, and a cold glass.
After the gazebo: a lucent blue pool,
surrounded by gray cement, and then a green sward;
behind that a garden, and therein a gnome on a stool,
who, while I drowsed, amongst the dewy flowers, became a bard.
Reid McGrath is a poet living in the Hudson Valley of New York.
Featured Image: “White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire” by Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)
Reid, I love your attention to sensory details! Your haiku are especially well-done because they pack so much into such tiny packages. That tennis ball simile makes me see something I hadn’t noticed before.
I like your poem on Indolence: the oblique rhyme with ‘coffee’ and ‘toast-warm wood’ – wow – that’s a Keatsian compound! Very sensuous.
Reid, your poems arouse my curiosity and make me more cognizant
Of the world we live in. Keep up the good work.
“the toast-warm wood” was the image that grabbed me.
The Adirondacks
for Evan Mantyk and Reid McGrath
The Adirondacks, rich in iron, once were mined;
and other minerals were garnet, as pyrite,
titanium, zinc, graphite, and wollastonite.
As well, tree-eating lumberjacks attacked these sites.
Throughout the 1900s, even more was gleaned,
galena for lead, gypsum, talc, and sphalerite.
But by 2000, most of th’ operations ceased,
or slowed, though not all cleaned. And yet, the mining sprawls,
amidst the beaver, fisher, martin, moose and lynx,
amongst the trees, streams, rivers, lakes and waterfalls,
helped build America’s industrial base might,
for that most vigorous of hardy animals.