Category: free verse

Here is a poem that I wrote in December in the comments section of Mary Lee Hahn’s website, Poetrepository. I didn’t want to lose it so, here it is.

 

 

Spin Cycle

The graveyard is full of them,
the forgotten ones who plowed the earth
milked the cows and fed the chickens,
washed the clothes and hung them on the line
then baked lemon bars for
church basement funerals.

Dreams cleared the land. Hope built fences.
Now ash trees sprout in the pasture. And
fences fall under the weight of my neglect.
A washing machine rusts quietly in the tall grass,
returning bits of itself to the earth,
called home to its simplest beauty.

— Steve Peterson

Andrei Zverev via Compfight

A Walk with the Dog on New Year’s Day

At dawn on the first day
of the new year the sun also rises
to burst over the hill
with sudden brilliance.
So, together we walk,
this old dog and me, in
the last year of her life.
Our shadows dance.
Such beauty in the new snow that
gleams under a crystal sky, in
the clouds of our mingled breath.
It peers from our shadows
that leap over the snow. For
even under a limitless sky,
we are most whole the moment
we touch the earth, when the darkness
brushes against the light.

– Steve Peterson