Dust

Dust StormCreative Commons License Rajiv Bhuttan via Compfight

Dust

All things are
connected, they say
even the flutter
of a butterfly’s wing can
raise a typhoon
half-way across the world.
They say the dust that
rises in the warm,
March sun was born in
the core of a distant star.
Toward the end, it burst
and scattered itself
across the galaxy and
into the house where
it collects quietly under the bed.
They say there is a
moment when the old
becomes new, when the new
becomes old again, the disconnected
reconnects. To everything
there is a season. They say ashes
to ashes, dust to dust.

– Steve Peterson

Spin Cycle

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.

 

IMG_0887
Photo by Steve Peterson

 

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

A Walk with the Dog on New Year’s Day

Snow & shadows 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

Small-Town Illinois Boy, 1974

Via Unsplash

Small-Town Illinois Boy, 1974

Some time it was,
it was a time of
muggy summer nights,
a yellow-moon that shone
through the corn-haze, past the
pulsing cicadas. Alice Cooper
yowled from the window
of a Mustang that crept
under the arching elms.
The red glow of a cigarette.
A tobacco threat exhaled
through the window into
the thickening air.
These bad boys of summer
are old and gray. Their
swagger sags. From the porch
couch, they watch the world pass by,
wondering if the kids will
finally call, or if they should
just pop another beer and be
done with it for the
rest of the evening.

– Steve Peterson

Poem Place Goes Live

Via Unsplash
Via Unsplash

I’m hoping to use this blog as a place to explore poetry writing over the long haul. I’m no expert, that’s for sure, and probably not even a poet, but writing gives me pleasure and helps me to notice stuff that I’d otherwise forget to see. Like the photo above, I seek an occasional window into worlds unknown. Sharing my work gives it a life it would not otherwise have. As for the quality of the poems I will write in this blog space? Maybe, for me, quantity is more important than quality right now. We’ll see how it goes!