(Written in 2005)

​A murmuring fall in the fading light,
A sweep and a stream down the eaves at night,
A muttering drum on the roof overhead,
A pelting persistent on glass and on ledge,
 
Comes the rain.
 
The softest of mists that caressingly spills
Upon muted greens of the faraway hills
Fades them out gently, soft and shy,
Whispering away into cool, grey sky.
 
Lullaby silences linger in rain,
Hushing, surrounding with lulling refrain,
And leaving, as all things else quietly cease,
Just me alone with the dripping trees.
 
And when at the day’s end the clouds thin and part,
And sunlight comes flooding the world wet and dark,
Then flings over grey clouds and damp earth and all
The song of a rainbow in breathless enthrall.
 
Passes the rain.

Fine ice made satin ribbon of the road that strode
The high plateau-land of the Great Divide.
Tall, ponderous ranges flanked my either side
And, softly cumbered with the heavy snows
that deeply drifted from all winter’s throes,
Resembled august and colossal rows
Of pallid, smoothly tumbled jasper.
The early morning sunshine peered among
Dispersing then combining clouds that clung
Awhile to nearby peaks, then briskly flung
At me a few standoffish banks of fog.
The mists that ever shroud the mountains
Roiled round my car like flustered gods
As if inquiring why I trod so high,
For now we all were wandering in the sky,
The clouds, the sunlight, and the road, and I.
But as I drove that lonely plateau road,
So coldly drawn between such silent hills,
The heavens briefly turned to stained glass mode:
The sunlight found a place to filter through.
The clouds that fumbled near me brightened to
Light rose and salmon cotton candy hues.
The snow-bound mountains all around me too,
in bandied light that danced and leapt and fell,
Blushed in several shades of faint pastel,
And momentarily the universe was pink;
Then all turned back to grey.

Words are colours
People paint.
“I love you—“
“I hate you—“
“You’re so ugly,
I’ll faint.”
They think that those colours
Will fade in a day,
But what they don’t know
Is that colours make paintings--
And murals— and worlds.
Mutters turn to echoes
That alter every hue,
And manipulate the sunlight,
And change the kind of blue
That shimmers in the sky
When you make someone cry.
The world was made with words
And still is being made.
Tell the trees you love them;
Encourage all the stones.
Know your spoken kindness
Invigorates your bones.