There is no warmth outside today
when ice and sleet cover the ground
beneath a freezing sky of gray
whose cold winds set the pines to sway.
No hints of autumn are around.

For this is winter at its worst
no thoughts of spring come into mind.
Shoulders hunch, cold lips are pursed
I survey a landscape that seems cursed
a world described, at best, unkind.

I am baptized with a wave
and a dry palm leaf
the wind brought from the trail.
I was there with him.

We crossed country roads,
went through the grasses
and mangrove swamps,
waded in rivulets, stomping
and breaking to pieces
darkening mirrors of ponds.

Smoke in the nostrils,
hay in the hair, we shared the air
with widening prairie.
We drank the abundant belated bloom
and finally found the way to the shore.

Our vehicles swarm in a steel hot day
Around the busy round-about
Where the highway meets Route 4.
It was there my eyes saw a raven
Arriving and defiantly posed
Folding his wings behind his back,
In the center of the berm with dead weeds,
Encircled by a wall of stone.

His eyes followed our every move;
Black like the craggy graveyards
He must have come from
(Like that stupid poem we read in school
About some creepy bird and fool).

Submitted by Esker on Fri, 2017-05-26

Perfect weather
Sitting in the summer garden
Inner energy and outer climate are one
Seamless Passion

My body and nature world
are one perfect harmony.
Self and universe are one pure unity

Perfect Weather

Sitting in the garden
Being one wholeness.
I love the summer
Everything beautiful
Creation wonder
Human life Miracle.

Maitreya
Buddhamaitreya.co.uk

Kubla Khan
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
THE ORIGINAL

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

The street was deserted, Nothing moved
in its calm surround.
A steady drizzle trickling, the only sound
breaking silence, before a cloud burst unleashed
heaps of hail on the barren street,
streaming into free flowing rivulets
cleansing the path,
in diffused light of the stars.