It's Time

                        It’s Time

Or say once more it’s time to write.

You can’t look away forever.  

Morning takes so long.  You think

of the song that waits, the line

you started but left for later.

The book you are reading

for the third time takes long

enough to be a new adventure. 

The people are the same,

but meanwhile you changed.

It’s beginning to winter.  Yesterday’s

rain is white on the ground. 

The sky clears. You wake and

remember you are old, the tune

in your mind starting to fade.

                              

                                                          —Donnell Hunter

                                                             26 November 2012

Practice

                    

                        Practice

I practice widowerhood

since you’ve been gone to nurse

your sister for a week.  

Some days are long.  I make

the bed with only my wrinkles

to smooth out and leave your

pillow undisturbed in place

to help recall our last embrace.

                               —Donnell Hunter         

                                               29 October 2021

The Fall

                  

      The Fall

Once more I face the Fall.  Its leaves hold on

one brief moment, then let go.  I sweep

them up and till them into garden soil. 

Rain and snow can come now, though I hope

they allow a few more days of Indian

summer to enjoy these color splotches

fading chloroplasts expose to view.  

Frost and the gathering dark hover

over our lives, one year closer to winter’s

teeth, to the cold earth that waits us all.

                                        —Donnell Hunter

                                                    20 October 2012

The East Margin

         The East Margin

Whenever my lines find the real east

margin, always a word like an icon

bounces back into the middle of my poem.

North, west, south, the sun rises, sets, or floats

in a slow flat line.  An osprey dives, locks

talons on a trout too heavy to lift,

and drowns, a victim of greed and lust. 

The South Fork, her runoff held in check

by a dam, flows her implacable way

to the sea.  I’ll settle for that.  But once

on the bank of the Clark Fork thirty years

back a poem burst past the east margin

and found its way through the kingdom

of dark to the very heart of the sun. 

—Donnell Hunter

                                                 28 September 2011

Newborn

            Newborn

                                                for Donita

With eyes that can’t yet focus

you look around the room with wonder,

at faces draped in linen and hear sounds

unlike the muffled heart you grew up

under.  You hear voices you can’t

articulate, nor differentiate tones

of joy from those that signal danger

in this new world where everything

is strange and you the newest stranger.

                                    —Donnell Hunter

                                                 18 September 2011

September Song

September Song      

Somewhere between the man I’ve become

and the poet I have not, my life moves on.

Where my self is is another question.

Maybe out back in the yard too wild to tame

with my one good arm.  Or in cottonwood shadows

flung across the lawn I have yet to mow.  Yes, winter

is on its way.  We cover tomatoes and hope

Indian summer will let green ripen into red

and allow the last two ears of corn to find

our table before raccoons finish off the patch.

Both our streams are man made.  They run from May 15

until October when the water-master turns

them off and fish gape in pools left behind.  My neighbor

tries to catch them on his one day off.  I retired

and no longer fret about things like that.  A friend

ten years younger than I would like to leave this world

and join his wife, but can’t seem to find the right

path out.  All our older friends are gone. 

The poets who taught me how to make these lines

passed on where rivers run west, not north like those

in their poems.  They took sea lanes out or hid beneath

the ice when I asked about the farm.  Telephone lines

gave way to wireless.  The birds who listened to their rhymes

flew south except for mottled finches in full molt

who wait for tails to grow back in to guide them home.

                                                —Donnell Hunter

                                                               14 September 2012

Red Sky at Morning

            Red Sky at Morning

                                                                                    For Larry

The sun turns crimson in the August sky.

Next door the young cock crows to welcome dawn,

and I discover death has passed me by.

I rise to greet the day before me.  Why

am I still here when all my friends are gone?

The sun turns crimson in the August sky.

My mirror shows three new wrinkles when I try

to smooth my aging flesh, now weak and wan,

but death, still merciful, has passed me by.

Young Margaret dries her tears without a sigh.

The golden grove lies leafmeal on the lawn.

The sun turns crimson in the August sky.

My neighbor bales his hay.  The stacks grow high,

the harvest great, the doe still leads her fawn

across the meadow.  Death has passed me by.

Days are a blur.  Weeks, months, and now years fly

with quickened pace, so much of memory flown.

The sun turns crimson in the August sky,

while I lament that death has passed me by.

                                    —Donnell  Hunter

                                                14 August 2012