To Saint Nicholas

I received an invitation to write this poem when Heidi White on The Daily Poem issued a challenge to compose a poem on Saint Nicholas. Having no resistance to such challenges, I took up pencil and composed. Here is my piece -

To Saint Nicholas

Your left hand did not know, good Nicholas,

What wealth your right hand gave.

Munificent extreme 

and humbly dark,

Your dexterous style of giving to the poor.

 

This marks a saint - to see a need,

Not as a glass in which to preen 

the plumes of charitable self,

But as a gap to pour 

the fullness of a loving heart, 

till it be filled and more.

You shunned the world's remembrance,

And so, like sportive children, we remember you.

While you, untouched by all the world can give

of praise or blame,

Receive with unveiled eyes 

and longing heart

Your Lord's "Well done."

- AFB, 12-21-21

The dowry for the three virgins (Gentile da Fabriano, c. 1425, Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome)

To the Periodical Cicada - A Poem

We have been fascinated with the advent of the seventeen-year cicadas. Their presence is overwhelming and many consider them a nuisance, but I see their life cycle as a thing of wonder. This poem is an expression of that wonder.

Spellbound for sixteen years
But on the seventeenth -
Spell breaks.
Earth breaks.
Silence breaks.
Grub of the dust
Is clothed in wings
of flame, body of ebony, eyes of ruby -
a sudden dragon -
and it sings!
Poor things
old earth treaders scorn the sound
of long-pent revelry
from creatures of the underground.
Clamourous and clustering,
Dissonant, disruptive
Impertinent, invasive,
and incredible
What giddy joy of wings!
Whirr, tumble, dive,
electrify the air,
and stop to sing.
Soon all this rush of noise,
resonance of the short-lived glorified
each orange-veined glass of skyblown wing
Will drop into the quiet grass
and crumble to the patient earth
Until another birth