Scraps of Brightness

A handful of short (short!) poems

Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash

My last post showed you the longest poem I’ve ever written; this week we’re having a rest. Here are half a dozen tiny poems — written at different times, in different moods, and usually to my confusion (“That’s it? There’s not more?”). Perfectly capable, every one, of shining a light all out of proportion to their size.

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                                                                                                 1981

Light –- a whispered word –-
the ring on the water where
a feather drifts down.

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ENVY                                                                                       1995


Crumpled paper sack
scrapes along the sidewalk,
dreams the flight
of origami birds.

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                                                                                                 2007

Across a field of years
his sergeant’s voice comes booming.
Her shoulders stiffen; even now,
even still, she is enlisted,
under orders she has failed to follow.

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KUNDALINI CAT                                                                    2009


Yes, just there
where my tail coils out, my spine
springs free from my body
to dance in the air –- 
rub just there.

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HUMMINGBIRD                                                                   2011


Fleet at rest
on pineapple sage:
   beak a twig,
   wing a leaf,
   throat a ruby blossom.
Hidden in brightness,
   gone again,
blossoming fleet in air.

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NOTE TO DR. WILLIAMS                                                  2024


Much also
depends

on wisteria
petals

in a pale-scented
drift

on the worn
brick steps.

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[You can listen to an audio version of these poems — so many poems! less than two minutes’ recording time! — using the little widget above the photograph.]

“Light — a whispered word…” is a haiku, or meant to be. I’m fond of this one because it quietly celebrated a turning point in my then-life: not finished with the hard time I was having, but beginning to see a way through.

Envy appeared in a chapbook that I self-published¹ during another, um, educational life-season, and it was the poem that everybody commented on from the collection. My cynical self wondered if that was because it was shortest. Maybe so; maybe they all were grateful for a single brief metaphor, poignant or not.

“Across a field of years…” was written during a poetry workshop I led at a church retreat. I’d brought in a handful of extra-generic sentences — “He enters the room,” “They are eating” — and invited folks to build poems by restating the generic sentences as specifically and vividly as they could. I think this one started out as “She hears him.” Indeed, she does.

Kundalini Cat — I mean, why not?

Hummingbird — a fleet, darting poem for a fleet, darting subject.

Note to Dr. Williams — We’ve all written at least one of these, right? At least I didn’t relitigate the plums in the icebox. And those brick steps littered with wisteria blossom are a sight on which much at least of my sense of well-being depends, every spring.

🌿

Do you have a favorite, from this half-dozen? Do you have a short poem of your own that you’d like to share? Comments are open; let’s fill them up with brief shining treasures.

1. “Self-published,” in this case, means, “typed up a quite nice template in WordPerfect, had saddle-stapled copies made at Kinko’s, and presented them forcibly to family and friends.” That counts, right?