Lotus Flower

hopeful holds the tension

dew jewels cling the sway

clasped tight against the world

not yet knowing it's ok

the waiting deepends color

it accepts every sun ray

gathering its truth song

beauty at bay so long

awaiting opening to day

"Forest"

This is the one I've entered into a contest already (I'm still slightly ambivalent about it, but it's my 5th or 6th draft and I guess it's ok..):

Oak pieces rickety-rock
grandma
and her sewing needles
in the back room.

Cut-short redwoods

primly present

school pictures to one another

from their positions on
slabs of color-slathered
cedar between which

families
in newness
in change
in growth
in life and in death
make home.

A "finished" maple
snakes along her sister,
now stairs, to balance
the bounding kids
up and down her ratchets.

Slams of mahogany
slice through kitchen
and bedroom with bustles
of play and dinner.

A column of hickory,
now enclosing chimes and bells,
tickety-tocks the passing of days
from the entryway;

the stump:
home to

new life

from old death...
or the tickety-rock
of progress.

(formatting is weird at points, there shouldn't be more than one space anywhere but I don't know how to fix it...)

Leaf-prints

It's been days since you left me

fluttered far and fast

twirled your stuff free from me

and though I knew it wouldn't last

I cannot stand the coming cold,

cannot bear this nakedness;

true it happens every year,

you abandon greens and - duress!

for me, now I seem

because of your cloaks of red

just seasonal moments away

from looking truly dead!

And now all that's left of my former clothes -

oh I nearly cannot bear to say! -

are your prints on the sidewalk underneath

made with tears and relentless rain.

Blow Me Away

my friend fogs in practicality on my sunny-like-sharp conversations about love and truth

and when the rain comes through my conscience it leaves the clouds of what-to-do?

all this how-and-why talk floods of frustration on what could be teeming vasts of you

and me talking with heavier seas

don't you see?

through a wor storm cloudly?

that, my friend, you can't even breathe until the weather stops and you're all you'll be?