Poems
Junipers
Like slum lords with clipboards
we check the garden
for plants that need removal,
covering the grounds
for eviction. The junipers have to go.
These Gothic mounds of green
bear no blossoms. The foliage
like rough-haired curs
is arched and prickly;
needles, bristling,
catch the light
like teeth.
They flank the yard,
pit bulls, self-crowned bullies
whose only job is defense.
We collar them to the pickup,
pull at full throttle
and listen for the whipcrack of limbs,
the tearing loose of roots.
But the junipers cleave fiercely
to where they’re planted,
stay, like faithful hounds,
and leave the truck smoldering,
its fender curled like a lip.
Copyright 2005 Jane Alynn
from Threads & Dust
Finishing Line Press, 2005.
Winner of a William Stafford Award, Washington Poets Association, 2004
Hummingbird
She remembers how he entered the flower,
keen on the honeysuckle
that fluttered itself,
enamored of red–
his brazen body, hovering,
darting in and out,
interrupted, now and then,
by the humming
of a nictar-seeking rival,
equally as beautiful.
Then with the flush of spring
he turns a coppery back to her,
ascends, slowly, to great heights
and dives on whistling wings
in a giddy twist toward her, tail on fire.
She’d like to get used to this.
But such displays are short-lived.
Given to being alone,
never alighting–or not for long,
ever a flitterer, he buzzes off
to the next flower
as she knew he would,
leaving her the nest
and a hunger
greater than her tiny body lets on.
from Floating Bridge Review
2008 Floating Bridge Press