Two Poems by Michael Smith

Michael Smith

Michael Smith

A retired chemist and mathematics professor, Michael G. Smith's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Matter, New Mexico Poetry Review, Nimrod, Sulphur River Literary Review, Superstition Review, the Kerf, the Santa Fe Literary Review and other journals. In the Spring of 2012 he completed a writing residency at Jentel Arts. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.

The Soft Tense of Bombs

London, June 26, 2012

Welcome evening, welcome
this voice and this voice

as the grass dampens,
these voices

dropping from the sky,
this rain of poems,

hope and hands reaching
skyward

to catch a fervid
drop,

falling bookmarks
armored

with poems, each blessed
word soothing

this heart, that
heart,

our human hearts,
Guernica,

that rehashed experiment
outflanked again.

 

 

 

This Fervid World as Bruised Apple

Caught in the act:
the cyclist's wind-
blown hair; oak tree
hacked and shredded
for that better
garden view, no
when will the buck-
saw be hushed, this
moment empty.
Only a moored
determinist
would try to cage
it. Every day
a wilderness.
Every day umpteen
acts linking
sunsets. Virga
in the arid
lands; the clam's
bullish shells.
This fervid world
as bruised apple:
last bite, hardcore
with willing seeds.

- with a line from Rita Dove