from the train window

a lone heron
picking through the clouds-
rainy pond

Rain

gravedigger
when you dig my grave
could you make it shallow
so that i can feel the rain
~~~~~~Gravedigger, Dave Matthews Band.
Listening to DMB on a rainy day and drinking coffee is close to perfection.

Truth

We don't know what we want, but we are ready to bite somebody to get it.
~Will Rogers

Train ride

I always stepped off the escalator
And into your arms
The Vietnamese station-master
always watching
One day you were late.
He laughed
Said
“he left you. Why don’t you
come home with me?”
I laughed too.
Not many moons later
He saw me again
Step off the escalator
Into no one’s arms
Started to laugh
Then he saw my eyes.
I said
“this time you’re right.”
This time he didn’t laugh
And neither did I.

Had I told the sea

In the summer
I stretch out on the shore
And think of you
Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.

Nizar Qabbani, In the Summer

Bearhug

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

~Bearhug, Michael Ondaatje

When death shall cut him short

Happy the hare at morning
for she cannot read
The Hunter’s waking thoughts.
Lucky the leaf
Unable to predict the fall. ...
But what shall man do, who can whistle tunes by heart,
Know to the bar when death shall cut him short, like the cry of the shearwater?

~WH Auden