Rust

"You need a new wheelbarrow," my neighbor remarks

watching me trundle my shallow, rusting

cart to the curb, orphaned limbs and sticks

protruding like morning hair fresh

from an unmade bed.  "I've a better one

that a friend brought for our yard sale."

I'm not impressed.  He doesn't know that when

I lift the handles, the weight shifts

from my hands to those of my father sleeping

beneath the debris of a Missouri winter.

He doesn't know that this handcart

carries the fragments of my mind, the tributes

housed in the rubbish of winters turned

to spring, similes and metaphors waiting

the right poem, fractured lines

of hyperbole and hope, alliterative alleys

of childhood discards.  How could he see

beyond rust, the sonnet reclaimed? 

Jeremiahs All

In almond trees and boiling pots, the word

            of poetry finds it womb.

From the imperceptible breath

            of photosynthesis, carbon

dioxide and water mystically melded,

            oxygen generated, released.

The heat of growth breathes and bubbles

            in the cauldron of creation.

Cool winters dream the seeds, fruit

            releases from its pulpy uterus

like water escaping from a cylinder in vapor.

It's the transformation that calls us,

            the energy ignited in changed

molecules, the sudden event we neither

            perceive nor understand.

God brushes our mouths with finger tips

            transfiguring halting words

into language of nuts and stews,

            roiling and frothing,

the initiation of thought and idea

            making us Jeremiahs released

from the paralysis of infantile speech.