December Charms - Missoula, Montana

"...How swift spring-summer-autumn drift

To epitaphs scrawled on a gift

Of moment-gold we cannot hold

For Time is insistent and bold

…and strips the bud that broke and thrilled

The limb where spring and summer spilled

To winds of phantom, freight-like train

That brings December once again

It rumbles from wide open skies

And showers silver sparkle-sighs

To eventide once dull and brown

December is November’s crown"

- From "December...again" by © Janet Martin

Ponder Janet's full poem here - your soul will thank you.

Lichen The Neighborhood - Missoula, Montana

"There are often inquiries about cultivating lichens...Alas, there's no reliable way anyone has found to keep lichens going once they've been relocated... We can't tame lichens; as Irwin Brodo has said, in Lichens of North America, "...lichens are the essence of wildness." " - Stephen Sharnoff, in his essay 'Lichens and Oaks: A Deep Partnership'

Naked Tree Thought - Missoula, Montana

"The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought,

Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught

In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront

Implacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt."

- D. H. Lawrence, Winter in the Boulevard, 1916

Radial Pine Patterns - Greenough Park, Missoula, Montana

The radial twist of these deadfall limbs was more apparent when it was right in front of me, but contrast patterns still abound betwixt sun, snow and shadows.

Holdover - Missoula, Montana

This mysterious clinging when mass others give way
Is not as uncommon as the ubiquitous ‘they’

Would have us construe.

-ch

Winter Red - Missoula, Montana

“Incomparable beauty, the snow

If only it could wait until the autumn leaves fall”

-From English translations of Waka Poems by Minosuke Noguchi (1875-1972).

Noguchi immigrated from Japan to the U.S. in 1898; for 42 years, he farmed in northeast Colorado, then moved in 1948 with his wife to upstate New York.

 

Click here to read more of his calm thoughts, plus a bit more about this poetry form.

Unexpected Greens - Missoula, Montana

“The real enemies of our life are the 'oughts' and the 'ifs.'

They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future.

But real life takes place in the here and now." - Henri Nouwen (1932-1996)

Streaming Tree Shadows - Missoula, Montana

"A closed heart can't greet
a winter sky…

...Winter trees....

reach for the sky to offer praise –

stark, hard praise, born from all

those rooted years of bearing

the sky's weight….

..My sister, when she was younger,
awoke in winter to hold her arms

up to the sky, shiver in the wholeness
of it, let shadows of winter trees
dance sunlight across her face..."

-    - From “In Praise of Winter Trees” by Bill Brown

(OhPleaseOhPlease click here to be absorbed by the full text of this very lovely poem. 

It's hard to pass up a writer who lives with his wife "and a tribe of cats".)