Shannon's October Poem

Hi Everyone!

I'm sorry for vanishing on you in September. My dog was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and we were preparing for an intense last month with him. Fortunately for him (because he didn’t suffer) and unfortunately for us (because we miss him terribly), he went into failure just three days after his diagnosis... We had to say goodbye so quickly. I’m just now getting back to poetry and to my regular schedule.

Here is my October poem! I’ll comment on your poems soon! 

Sketches of Daydreaming

A musician hauls his piano into the open-air market to play his scales;

all around him, vendors balance fresh dates, mangoes, and pears on scales.

Hundreds of miles away, a woman stands by window reading old letters

on paper embossed with leaves that scale

the margins—the way dry leaves curl under a boy’s feet in a park

in Delaware. To him, they’re dragon scales.

At home, his sister sketches blueprints of her perfect city,

one with spiral staircases and glass elevators drawn to perfect scale.

The ink becomes oceans, streets and trees, becomes notes.
This is where the singing happens. It starts with the simplest scale.

Dargie's Sept/Oct poem

WHAT THE COWS ARE DOING

 A little bit of light

is better than no light at all.

Indoors you wouldn’t even know the light

had started; you’d be boiling water,

getting breakfast

under the overhead lights.

But out here there is the river’s incandescence.

The turf farm’s strange agriculture. 

What the cows are doing,

there in your favorite pasture just west of the tollbooth.  

Can you read an omen

in the cows’ formation this morning,

in whether they are massed together

or straggled out over the hillside—

or whether one, or several, are wading, chest-deep,

in the livestock pond,

or are brownly scattered up the drainage,

under scarce trees?

Did you catch it?

The landscape,

saying something,

here, under the Kansas sky.