Every Sunday I try to find a poem I’d like to share, and every Sunday I marvel at how much great work there is out there. I hope to give you a mix of the old, the less old, the nearly new, and the brand new. Here’s one from William Stafford that I particularly like. ” . . . the flute end of consequences.” Indeed.
At the Bomb Testing Site
At noon in the desert a panting lizard
waited for history, its elbows tense,
watching the curve of a particular road
as if something might happen.
It was looking at something farther off
than people could see, an important scene
acted in stone for little selves
at the flute end of consequences.
There was just a continent without much on it
under a sky that never cared less.
Ready for a change, the elbows waited.
The hands gripped hard on the desert.
From Poetry.com
William Stafford, “At the Bomb Testing Site” from Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems. Copyright © 1960 by William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, http://www.graywolfpress.org.
The Bearing Tree 