Summer Hares
With black tipped ears
the summer hares
rip out from the dry corn stalks.
Stirred from the warm earth bed
ahead of the sound of sharp jaws
cutting to stump and stubble,
the scything, reaping
the cadence of machines
and sun maddened men shouting,
collect the falling seed.
Long bows of running dogs,
yew strong and ligament strung,
gripped in hard worked hands
calloused where the skin touches life
tensed and released,
sight and nose pointed.
Leather slipped the heavy arrow-head flies,
broad skulled to bowl over,
barbed teeth to tear the soft flank.
The violent spill leaving the heavy fur sack,
the gathered seed.
The White Swan Rising
The heron drags it’s black tipped wings across the grey morning’s river on the edge of the silent wood of
insulating damp bark and moss.
Hung from trees the tissue paper lanterns of fragile clear moments start to flare and burn away as
the morning hides the stars.
The white swan rising through the wind driven rain cups air and lifts, a lover pulling the beloveds head to her chest
rising up from the embrace.
Old Photographs In those old photographs of miners, draymen, laborers and horsemen, burned into serrated edged, white-collar frames, they are young and drunk on summers, sober on hard work, Push- pulling the plough, the quartet footfall of hair curtained hooves , some iambic familiar picking over the ruts with slapping leather reins, didn’t these bring words to mind, like bringing fresh faced girls to the dance, excitement, anticipation, recreation of the self, something new. Those faded lines of loom workers with wool dust lungs, dressed like their grandmothers with bradle sharp fingers, There is no record, no thing for another to see. The rhythm, the weave, the weft, the dance died with them, as it had lived with them, unexpressed in the air around them only. Stained air of wode and indigo, horse sweat and rain. The song only hummed, never sung.
Tree roots span the decaying edge,
peaked eddies whisper and pass,
the nights words gone and mixed in the tumbling current.
Were they ever pausing to hear something never said, waiting for someone who never came?
Filling the waiting with pictures.
The otherness of new words, what the shared breath can be?
shinny from separating taught wool.
In the dark, after making love, cupped in the hand of the night where waking can be forgotten, didn’t they think they owned the night and everything in it, could weave if not write down beautiful hangings of what they knew inside, the green of the grass by the loom room stream, the rag- winged buzzards mobbed by crows.
Put aside for the work to be done.
Copyright G S Buss 2009