Crickets and cicadas sound
August with open windows
Squirrels barking Summer's
end
Adrift, as we are, in this
sea of chaos
At the boundaries of each
specific frame
We can taste and consume
the messages
Recycle their colors as
sound
And fashion the harmonics
of love
At the boundaries of each
fractal
Nothing appears to be moving
Yet we share with each other
These
discrete items of infinite variety
Increased complexity, elegance
and ordered simplicity
Within this specific frame
At the boundaries of our
six senses
Love and compassion forge
life
And we hold with all the living this
sense of awe
In the shared recognition
of order, emergent pattern
Ratio and degree
Crickets and cicadas sound
Winter's silence, well met with open arms
Christmas pheasant, With all the fixings
The Tunesmith
by Matthew Shane O'Neill
See
the fiddle hollowed ancient hourglass
Her hair draped over right eye to hide
Charged, taught, fired countenance modeled lass
Pint stands guard to side.
Unaware ears are being hypnotized
By tunes packed in back pocket
Her own mind truly mesmerized
Tune turning key to soul's locket.
Nimble quick fingers flying, marking
Old heartwood ebony with flawless precision
Bow touches steel strings with soundboard resounding
Wound tight as drawstring of Orion.
A reel meanders its way through smoky clamorous pub
While disregarding rowdies hoist stout beer
And those to The Tunesmith they dub
From airs bring forth unsalty tear.
Great Cruelty and Heartlessness
by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
We're living in a time of great cruelty and heartlessness
Where instead of a sun they're throwing up
anvils
Instead of sunlight there's the sound of
hammers beating
Instead of walking there's kicking
Instead of thinking there's talking
It's almost as if there've never been times like
these before
Even shadows thrown by cartwheels on dirt roads
resemble the grimaces of armies as they
slide across rocks
in the palaces of power clocks go off but no one
wakes
Decisions are made by pouring acid down drains
or waiting for nightfall in a room lit by
neon tubes
If anyone speaks all eyes are upon them
I saw a sparrow fly over a fence
An ant stop and not go on
But laughter has turned to pebbles
AN ANTELOPE GREW TIRED OF LOPING
by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
An antelope grew tired of loping
and became a small thatched cottage on the
shady side of a hill where old people and
loving couples would pass by from time to time
and knock on the door and find
no one home
A lynx in the forest saw a slanting ray of sunlight and
became a dragonfly hoping to scale it to its
source and live daringly and unlynxlike in its
bright delights above the earth forevermore
A stairway grew annoyed for the last time at all the
ups and downs ups and downs that went on and became a
prancing pony running free on hillsides of
buttercups and rhododendrons for one long
summer until it found itself taking
children around and around a corral which was
in any case better than being a staircase
And bankers became clouds and clergymen became
Roman statues and penguins remained penguins even
after given the opportunity of a lifetime to
leave the Antarctic once and for all
And we also in our constraints whistling to harmonize with
shrill factory letout or a Broadway orchestra or
the latest pop song
somehow bursting out of our solitary confinement from
time to time to knock on the
door of a little thatched shack on the
shady side of a hill and find
no one's there that bounds off behind us
to be an antelope again joining its
nervous herd able at a
flick of an ear or tail to take off like a shot
as one beast singularly and explosively bursting with
fear and boundless joy
