This Poem of the Week is under the influence of both great beauty and two great threats–the threat of winter coming and catching me unprepared, and the threat of the results of the election plunging our nation into a terrible winter. We each have our own preparations of the homestead or apartment or heart for nature’s winter, and we each have our own way of working on the election. If you do nothing else, please make a donation right now at https://movement.vote/

This poem is another hainet, a series of seven haiku that act like a sonnet in some ways. I usually revise poems fifty times or more, but these poems of the week are raw. I have done a little tweaking to the poem and to the video, but it’s mostly a first take. I will print the text of the poem below, and I will include what I wrote at the top of the page about this strange and wondrous new form I’ve invented:

These hainets are teaching me as I go. Sometimes they are ladders, and sometimes they are fall leaves drifting down going a little this way and then back and then a little that way and then back before coming gently to rest, and sometimes they are like a fall leaf swirling in a gentle whirlpool in a stream, circling back to the beginning before floating off and dropping to the bottom, and sometimes they are like all of those at once…

nasturtiums crane necks
geese fly south high overhead
ears cup like blossoms

huge basswood leaves fall
yikes platters slide off high shelves
gentle angels catch

so many colors
red purple orange yellow
eyes flit like fall birds

old man wakes fall days
alarmed and turns young and strong
to stack winter wood

dark purple asters
preach wisdom from the good book
urge we stop and look

what will make winter
good is not just shed wood filled
but heart fall light filled

nasturtiums open
wide mouths turned to last warm light
to drink and to praise

10/1/24