Category: Poetry Sketchbook

The New Moon can’t be trusted. Rather than float her darker face as a shadow dotting the brilliance of the sky, she hides behind a blue mask. Still the glassy surface of my inner pool grows agitated, my vision blotted and obscured, as if a storm should darken the horizon, or a great wave loom…

I wonder, because reading so inevitably pushes me to write. I wonder, and I even worry. What if I’d never seen a poem? Might I burst apart one day from the pressure of too much held in too long? Could I have learned, even as slowly as I do, how to forge words into a…

old thoughts sometimes wear grooves so deep they bury themselves before new ones can rise the buried old ones make good fertilizer Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser

Poetry turns an unshuttered eye on beauty, on ugliness, and everything between. It translates the profound through focus on the loved, the reviled, and everything between. Not the driest news, nor the most turgid melodrama have anything on this passion expressed in objectivity, objectivity in passion. Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser

Slick roads. A thousand tires stir the water in a broken rhythm echoing off concrete. Brakes squeal, a helicopter passes overhead, not the first or last today. All around me people start another work day that begins, and will end, in traffic. People say this is the country, but in the rain I hear city….

When you’ve lived near the sea you notice its scent each time you return from far away. Fifty miles from home I’ve caught wind of it. Once, driving west across the desert from Arizona, still a hundred miles inland and separated by mountains, we hit a bank of salty air thick as fog. The sky…

With a few clicks I hang words here faster than ink could dry. Quick speech cast on the winds may evaporate to half-forgotten recollection, but this is more permanent. Poured in careless streams with little edit, boldly the slant and kilter of unfiltered thought sinks deep into real time. Collective thoughts carve a virtual Grand…

I watched a mourning dove fly up with such slow beat of wings, it seemed barely enough to make it fly. My heart, a free thing, loose and at odds with itself, longed to fly with it, to be its mate, to nest—to raise young— to free young things in flight in time, to stand…

A poem is violin song. It asks only that you let it play, even as it sings your life back to you, and rends your heart to hear it and do nothing but listen. Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser

There’s a quality of light just after a rain, when the sun first shines through gray and turns every green thing several shades brighter. The birds are subdued, but sound hopeful. The light sparkles in drops of water suspended on pine needles. It dims, then grows, in a pulsing kind of dance, from gray to…