Dunes

D
Taking root in windy sand
is not an easy
way
to go about
finding a place to stay.

A ditchbank or wood's-edge
has firmer ground.

In a loose world though
something can be started—
a root touch water,
a tip break sand—

Mounds from that can rise
on held mounds,
a gesture of building, keeping,
a trapping
into shape.

Firm ground is not available ground.
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Shoreline by Mary Barnard
Mary Barnard
The seas has made a wall for its defence
of falling water. Those whose impertinence
leads them to its moving ledges
it rejects. Those who surrender
it will with the next wave drag under.

Sand is the beginning and the end
of our dominion.

The way to the dunes is easy.
Read Poem
0
98
Rating:

Hymn to Life by James Schuyler
James Schuyler
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away
The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.”
The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence
And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made:
There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but
Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
Read Poem
0
165
Rating:

Byron by Frank Lima
Frank Lima
I put my hand
Into the dream
That falls upon
The air. It
Touches me a little,
But I don’t complain.
I’m almost asleep
When I get there.
Where Byron
Lost the scent of his
Life, over there,
Where the dreams are.
It’s always
Hot, like
The eyes of the
Read Poem
0
103
Rating:

Visit to the Zoo by Babette Deutsch
Babette Deutsch
From routine that deafly eats away
Is it the soul with slavering morselling bites:
From howls torn
Out of hours that have no throats, when dawn creeps
Back to her cavern with the unborn day:
From great this, little that: the dust
Hissing beneath the bed:
The silence
Read Poem
0
107
Rating:

Corsons Inlet by A. R. Ammons
A. R. Ammons
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned

along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
Read Poem
0
102
Rating:

Mary Shelley in Brigantine by Stephen Dunn
Stephen Dunn
Because the ostracized experience the world
in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it
clearly yet with such anger and longing
that they sometimes enlarge what they see,
she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls.
She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.

How startling, though, no one knew about her past,
Read Poem
0
92
Rating:

Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps #17 by Marvin Bell
Marvin Bell
1. At the Walking Dunes, Eastern Long Island
That a bent piece of straw made a circle in the sand.
That it represents the true direction of the wind.
Beach grass, tousled phragmite.
Bone-white dishes, scoops and bowls, glaring without seeing.
An accordion of creases on the downhill, sand drapery.
The cranberry bushes biting down to survive.
And the wind’s needlework athwart the eyeless Atlantic.
Read Poem
0
85
Rating:

The Lake in Central Park by Jay Wright
Jay Wright
It should have a woman's name,
something to tell us how the green skirt of land
has bound its hips.
When the day lowers its vermilion tapestry over the west ridge,
the water has the sound of leaves shaken in a sack,
and the child's voice that you have heard below
sings of the sea.

By slow movements of the earth's crust,
Read Poem
0
89
Rating:

American Solitude by Grace Schulman
Grace Schulman
“The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
—Marianne Moore Hopper never painted this, but here
on a snaky path his vision lingers:
Read Poem
0
83
Rating:

Santa Fe Trail by Barbara Guest
Barbara Guest
I go separately
The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me
ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands
it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched
where the westerly winds
and the traveler’s checks
the evensong of salesmen
the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases
Read Poem
0
90
Rating:

The Pit by John Fuller
John Fuller
From the beginning, the egg cradled in pebbles,
The drive thick with fledglings, to the known last
Riot of the senses, is only a short pass.
Earth to be forked over is more patient,
Bird hungers more, flower dies sooner.

But if not grasped grows quickly, silently.
We are restless, not remembering much.
The pain is slow, original as laughter,
Read Poem
0
101
Rating:

Lioness Asleep by Babette Deutsch
Babette Deutsch
Content that now the bleeding bone be swept
Out of her reach, she lay upon her side.
In a blonde void sunk deep, she slept, she slept
Bland as a child, slept, breathing like a bride.
Color of noons that shimmer as they sing
Above the dunes, her sandy flanks heaved slow.
Between her paws curled inward, billowing
Waves of desert silence seemed to flow.
Read Poem
0
109
Rating:

Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror by Peter Dale Scott
Peter Dale Scott
II.iv

I am writing this poem
about the 1965 massacre
of Indonesians by Indonesians

which in an article ten years later
I could not publish
except in Nottingham England with

a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since
Read Poem
0
106
Rating:

Land’s End by Weldon Kees
Weldon Kees
A day all blue and white, and we
Came out of woods to sand
And snow-capped waves. The sea
Rose with us as we walked, the land
Built dunes, a lighthouse, and a sky of gulls.

Here where I built my life ten years ago,
The day breaks gray and cold;
And brown surf, muddying the shore,
Read Poem
0
69
Rating:

Some San Francisco Poems: Sections 5-10 by George Oppen
George Oppen
5

THE TRANSLUCENT MECHANICS

Combed thru the piers the wind
Moves in the clever city
Not in the doors but the hinges
Finds the secret of motion
As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices, murmurs
Flaws
Read Poem
0
81
Rating:

Snowy Owl Near Ocean Shores by Duane Niatum
Duane Niatum
A castaway blown south from the arctic tundra
sits on a stump in an abandoned farmer’s field.
Beyond the dunes cattails toss and bend as snappy
as the surf, rushing and crashing down the jetty.

His head a swivel of round glances,
his eyes a deeper yellow than the winter sun,
he wonders if the spot two hundred feet away
is a mouse on the crawl from mud hole
Read Poem
0
82
Rating:

Food of Love by Carolyn Kizer
Carolyn Kizer
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.
Samuel Butler II  I’m going to murder you with love;
I’m going to suffocate you with embraces;
Read Poem
0
86
Rating:

Beech Forest by Stephen Sandy
Stephen Sandy
Light from the ugliest lamp I ever saw, here
on the table that triples for reading, eating (can’t say
dining), business on the phone; ugliest except
a few around the corner in that guest house at windows

—plaster driftwood; cylinders like rockets or sanitary
napkins propping shades; thin torso of a youth;
red globe on orange globe, the works, somebody’s
collection. Wouldn’t she love this one, lump of lamp base
Read Poem
0
86
Rating:

Monologue of a Commercial Fisherman by Alan Dugan
Alan Dugan
“If you work a body of water and a body of woman
you can take fish out of one and children out of the other
for the two kinds of survival. The fishing is good,
both kinds are adequate in pleasures and yield,
but the hard work and the miseries are killing;
it is a good life if life is good. If not, not.
You are out in the world and in in the world,
having it both ways: it is sportive and prevenient living
Read Poem
0
124
Rating:

Charleston by Henry Timrod
Henry Timrod
Calm as that second summer which precedes
The first fall of the snow,
In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds,
The City bides the foe.

As yet, behind their ramparts stern and proud,
Her bolted thunders sleep—
Dark Sumter, like a battlemented cloud,
Looms o’er the solemn deep.

No Calpe frowns from lofty cliff or scar
To guard the holy strand;
But Moultrie holds in leash her dogs of war
Above the level sand.

Read Poem
0
114
Rating: