Contemplative poems

Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.

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Dave Bonta

The Hollow (14)

off-trail in the woods in spiderweb season walking mindfully a loop of grapevine rising from the horsebalm patch the scent of lemons fall warbler I pish as if fluent in bird mysteries all its offspring on the other side of the deer fence the big pine

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (13)

downy rattlesnake plantain leaves always a start still twisted from its rush to leaf out lady’s-slipper orchid the blue-headed vireo’s vireo vireo sounds blue now pale pipes scorched and straightened by sex corpse plants

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (12)

a self-closing gate among 200-year-old oaks its rusty note smothered in leaf duff the violet’s self-fertilized alter ego ah to be both dapper and invisible striped wintergreen ignored by a pileated woodpecker the dust from her drill

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (11)

water standing in a raccoon footprint from here Plummer’s Hollow Run deer fence a sudden understory of shrubs and forbs protected from deer for nearly two decades now this plot thickens Smilax they say her thorniness drove a man wildflowery

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (10)

birch roots turned stilts a hollow in the shape of a stump desire path deer cutting across this trench of a trail raised high in a claw of upturned roots an ordinary rock smooth sandstone the empty seas of the first great extinction

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (8)

under the green oaks all the colors of flame tupelo too cold to move the red eft shivers when I stroke its back I lift my eyes to the hillside dead and dying mountain laurel a midnight-blue wasp its white-tipped antennae palpating the ground

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (7)

the descent beckons in three directions old charcoal haul roads crossroads deep in moss a ladder of fungi climbs a nearby snag namaste means I bow to the divine in you lightning-struck oak it’s not true that lightning never strikes twice spears of heartwood

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (6)

they must love the milk that makes them so bad-tasting milkweed bugs memorial bench all the young trees it shelters now the fog still lingers in a funnel spider’s web deertongue grass the “creep” in “creeper” battened to a locust trunk by a thousand tentacles

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (5)

ark ark so many ways of saying here in Raven the aging spruces still stand where we planted them their insurgent roots rings of mushrooms between the lines of trees one woodfern waving shaggy manes imagine the sweet release of autodigestion

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (4)

in the purple-stemmed jungle of pokeweed last year’s skeletons goldenrod meadow forty acres and a wren the somewhere else that is also here ridge after ridge too big to hide the spider draws in her legs and turns to gemstone

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (3)

glossy orange to mark the hatchet-cut scars property line beyond the line trees the same old view chestnut oak seedling “leave no trace” only my footprints now where spring beauties bloomed black locust grove the leaf miners have laid bare a rich vein of sky

Dave Bonta

The Hollow (1)

autumn equinox a mosquito takes its first steps walking on water where water sits at the head of the hollow a bench for reflection the not-rightness of it this vernal pool collecting autumn leaves ecdysis empty husks of former lives sink into the mud

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