Les plus lus ▸
Dave Bonta
Seeing the almost bare trees as antennae—intelligence-gathering stations for an alien umwelt, the rococo feelers of moths.
lonesome hollow
speaking softly so the void
doesn’t reply
What I miss most of all in the colder months: beetles and butterflies, crickets at night, and those delicate ninjas the ichneumon wasps. The way they tap the ground with paired canes, sniffing, listening.
unmarked path
a stick leaning on a tree
for the next hiker
sitting here waiting
for the light to turn green and
the world to make sense again
i suddenly realized
each hazy blur of traffic passing by
each blasting radio preaching The Word
each teeny-tiny passenger on that teeny-tiny airplane
is telling an epic story of a world
full of thousands of paths to thousands of other lives
in which i am nothing
Along the new trail, built by no one I knew,
acorns had fallen by thousands, more than enough
to leave creatures dazed by too much fortune.
Conkers have tumbled among them, each
experimentally chipped and then rejected
by some set of tiny teeth. Hazel nuts
were better, it seems. Should an adder pass en route
to denning, amid this rich mast, amid
this late fall of goldened leaves of ash
and beech, I might merely step aside,
unalarmed as any fattened squirrel.
Across the pasture, I remember, past
the partly shaded ferns, cowslips, bluebells,
buttercups of spring and summer, where
falling water, catkin-patterned, drowned out
the cygnet's cry in an otter's teeth (witnessed
If we took the old path
In the old field
The same gate would stand there
That will never yield.
Where the sun warmed us
With a cloak made of gold,
The rain would be falling
And the wind would be cold;
And we would stop to search
In the wind and the rain,
But we would not find the stargrass
By the path again.
The millway path looks like a wraith,
The lock is black as ink,
And silently in stream and sky
The stars begin to blink.
I see them pass along the grass
With slow and solemn tread:
Aoibheall, their queen, is in between--
A corpse is at their head!
They wander on with faces wan,
And dirges sad as wind.
I know not, but it may be that
The dead's of human kind.
When on the black abysses of the night
My little candle throws a trembling beam,
At first too faint and feeble it would seem
To give security to straining sight;
But presently we see its tiny light
Across the perilous pathway sends a gleam
That pierces through the darkness vast, supreme,
And step by step we find our way aright.
So in the vast and limitless unknown,
That wraps us with its fearful night around,
At first the beam by faith or knowledge thrown
Seems but to make the darkness more profound,
But presently one step ahead is shown —
Enough to prove that it is solid ground.
Needle, you make me remember things . .
A path through a wood that ran like wine,
A turn, and the bubbling smell that clings
Close as breath to the lips of springs
Where the sun is sprinkled fine.
Needle, you have a path to run
Where never the boughs of trees have met
And never has seeped the rain of the sun;
But long is the way you have just begun . .
Needle, you make me forget.
The light beats upon me.
I am startled--
a split leaf crackles on the paved floor--
I am anguished--defeated.
A slight wind shakes the seed-pods--
my thoughts are spent
as the black seeds.
My thoughts tear me,
I dread their fever.
I am scattered in its whirl.
I am scattered like
the hot shrivelled seeds.
The shrivelled seeds
are spilt on the path--
the grass bends with dust,
the grape slips
Blank and bare
Are the Woods of Despair,
On the goldenest summer day;
And grim and grey
The trodden way
That leads, that leads you there.
O often trodden,
Slippery, sodden,
Lonely, loathed way.
Turn and pace
From place to place,
From desolate nook to nook;
And in every brook
You stop to look,
You meet your own, own face,
Your sickened, weary,
Do you remember, passer-by, the path
I wore across the lot where now stands the opera house
Hasting with swift feet to work through many years?
Take its meaning to heart:
You too may walk, after the hills at Miller’s Ford
Seem no longer far away;
Long after you see them near at hand,
Beyond four miles of meadow;
And after woman’s love is silent
Saying no more: “I will save you.”
And after the faces of friends and kindred
Become as faded photographs, pitifully silent,
Sad for the look which means:
“We cannot help you.”
And after you no longer reproach mankind
With being in league against your soul’s uplifted hands—
To all in the village I seemed, no doubt,
To go this way and that way, aimlessly.
But here by the river you can see at twilight
The soft-winged bats fly zig-zag here and there—
They must fly so to catch their food.
And if you have ever lost your way at night,
In the deep wood near Miller’s Ford,
And dodged this way and now that,
Wherever the light of the Milky Way shone through,
Trying to find the path,
You should understand I sought the way
With earnest zeal, and all my wanderings
Were wanderings in the quest.
The branches of the trees lie in layers
Above and behind each other.
And the sun strikes on the outstanding leaves
And turns them white.
And they dance like a splatter of pebbles
Against a green wall.
The trees make a solid path leading up in the air.
It looks as though I could walk upon it
If I only had courage to step out of the window.