.................................
Four Poems
Thoughts While Listening To The Recorder
.................................

What is the sound of the dark-sapped wood?
An island of teakwood notes,
Night notes
Brought into daylight.
They sing the color of the deer.
Their kiss is the hem of a fire.
A clear reed tune darts tenderly from dark cherry wood.
It lifts as the smoke from cherry pipes, charred.
Treacherous notes!
To promise a ringing life and deliver pain,
A burst of orange
At near-range. The tea
Fills a glass rimmed with sugar. Ingar
Holds this icicle of amber light.
She shakes the moist, crying glass.
Her fingertips are cold.
There is a quiet kiss of the cubes in the glass.
Now, she will taste the sugar, drink the tea
Light coming in an East window.

 
.................................
Four Poems
Memoriam
.................................

Sad , brittle moonlight falls, drifting, on crumbled fir-bark
Broken by a hard green rain. In the herb garden, plainchanting,
Blue branches drinking in old evening moons.
Jazz flashed once through the dark green night
But chimes announced
The blood of a king
Unbroken, unhailed, poured
Through the hard summer fearlessly
Upon gold herbs.

 
.................................
Four Poems
Green Oaks
.................................

Green oaks of peace and truth;
Horns cry true fires of rhyming light.
Stars fall through limes of emerald, cold and clear--
The cry of peril in the winter sunlight.

 
.................................
Four Poems
Poem For Your Boychild
.................................

I.

Your mother was beautiful when I met her. She
Was like a fine piece of ivory that a ship protects
On a long voyage around the cape,
A gift that will be precious to someone in Europe
Far north across the angry sea.

II.

We drank coffee.
She was a stranger, with eyes like deep sounds.
She reminded me of the story of a maiden
Who turned flax into dark gold web to dress everything in,
Singing as she did her work.

III.

When I see pictures of the Madonna
I want to be an ancient sower of grain
In the red and gold courtyard of a manor,
Casting seed around a plowed field,
Taking care to scatter grain on sheets of gray rock
For the poor, and those who despair.

.................................
William B. Hunt
.................................

 
Copyright © William B. Hunt
June 1996

... a poem in this room by Jon Erickson...
surf and rescue
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