Counting Woodpeckers
I distain a sinkful of dirty dishes
to watch three woodpeckers drill on a pole,
four, five, then six of them clowning around
at the end of summer in a cold wind.
Counting woodpeckers puts me in mind of
other stony afternoons, counting hundreds
of thousands of steps on long ago walks
in defiance of merciless weather,
and the lack of a warm and sensuous life.
I enter this real day: gray sky, sopping lawn,
empty Adirondack chair at the pond
where I sat like a frog all summer
and let the sun make leather of my face
while softening some of the rest of me,
so long hard, so long hard and still counting.
.
I Love a Bench in the Sun
The earth is ours and all its fullness; founded upon the seas and established upon the flood. —Psalm 24
I love a bench in the sun, in the park,
at the lake, on a busy street or here
—land of the Piscataway and Susquehannock—
in a field of neon wild aster, alive with honeybees,
where tulip trees drop their leaves to earth.
We eat our lunch, which is only thick slabs of honey cake,
listening to pollinators when an intuition long disappeared
rises up in me like the gorged frost moon to save me,
at least for now, from yesterday’s white-knuckled striving
and years of restlessness.
The fullness of the earth makes me well this day
and all of us well.
© Rick Connor
Rick Connor’s writing has appeared in various publications including City Paper, Urbanite, Modern Liturgy and Freshly Squeezed: Write Here, Write Now (Apprentice House Press). He was a first-place winner of the Bethesda Literary Festival writing contest, but there was never poetry until the poetry group at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Towson University. And now poetry is everything.
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