The Woodpecker

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

The world needs drummers,

And hollow trees

need to speak of the lives

they have lived.

Listen carefully

for the pause,

that faint collection of seconds when the

resistant insect is extracted and swallowed…

just before the story begins again,

and Death smiles at his own cleverness.

© 2012-2013/Jamie K. Reaser 
Published in "Wild Life: New and Selected Poems" (www.hiraethpress.com)

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The Mark

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

At first I wanted to hide them

from the hunters;

These four tawny brown, 

horizontal slashes

with their shreds and peels of

old black birch bark

in which a late-wandering

black bear had written,

“I am here!”

I often keep secrets of the

forest folk,

especially this time of year.

“Shhhhhh!” I wanted to say.

“Shhhhh! These people,

drunk on sorrows

and looking for retaliation for

wounds you didn’t place,

seek to kill you.

These people have forgotten

the proper way

to take medicine.”

But when the rust-gnarled

pickup approached,

thundering down the mountain

slope, throwing twisting red

dust clouds

into the chilled air,

I stepped beside the tree,

and stood, plainly,

at the edge of the road.

You see:

In a split second, I had re-membered

what it is to be human.

You see:

In each one of us

is a deep desire

to leave a mark.

You see:

The one true mark you are

uniquely here to leave

necessitates that you risk

your life in being seen.

The courageous and

the sacred fools

make their mark anyway.

They make their mark anyway

because choosing to be

vulnerable

is our human medicine.

I smiled and waved to these

strangers on the Ridge.

You see:

I wanted to let them know

that they’d been fully seen.

© 2012-2013/Jamie K. Reaser

Published in "Wild Life: New and Selected Poems" (www.hiraethpress.com)

Thin Ice

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

There is always one winter morning

that is the first winter morning

for ice on the pond.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to those

who have lived decades

in the north next to still water,

But, for me, it still remains a wonderment,

an ordinary miracle made possible

by elements conspiring

to wake us with befuddling

predictability.

We have a ritual,

this particular winter morning

and I.

I wait for the sunlight to come,

anticipating the spectrum of colors

dancing among the gas bubbles

trapped in the glassy-crust.

And when it does come,

memory transports me back to my youth:

I am watching small wall-rainbows emerging from

crystalline prisms hanging from lamps

in a home that we once thought

was quiet and tender.

And then I’m in my teens:

The minister arose and ventured

onto the frozen reservoir,

and with the confident stride of a

once-Olympic skater,

drove forward until he found a place

thin enough to free him

of this world.

The imaginary me has stood,

for many a winter,

at the gaping hole left by his

sinking body,

asking questions about beliefs

and vows

and faith.

Now older, I focus on the red-spotted

newts and the snapping turtles moving

in the cold waters below the ice:

No one ever told me they could.

By the rules I was taught,

they can’t.

But they are.

They are there shuffling their thick legs

and looking, golden-eyed, back at me

with not a glint of surprise.

I love this ice, thin as it is.

It reminds me that 
that which can be readily explained 

is sometimes

best left

to wonderment.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author
From "Wonderment: New and Selected Poems" (a work in progress)

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The Last Full Moon

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

She beckoned me
to come to her
in silence.

She was radiant, glowing
and I was eager to lap at
her with a poet’s tongue.

But, no.

There was something else.

Something that reminded me of
my grandmother,

Pale and cold-bodied,
lying there,
dead,
in a viewing coffin

in a room frenetic with
stillness.

It took only seconds to realize:

Air thick with the essence
of ‘Goodbye’ ~

Ahh. Yes.

And then I knew:

She, as we have known Her,
was leaving us.

In This Time,
she would be the last 
full moon.

There is a reverence for Elders
that can split a heart open
when it arrives
from the humble depths
of soul.

Oh how I felt it,
and am feeling it still.

Silence.

It’s for everything ~

Everything,
 
that is too important to say.

© 2012-2013/Jamie K. Reaser

Swerving to Miss Caterpillars

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

In the Autumn,

when thirteen-segments,

fat and bristled,

dare the frenetic roads to find

tall, dry grasses in which to sleep

themselves into something

utterly different,

caterpillars can be your prayer.

What kind of person do you

choose to be?

Every moment of every day

you have this question put before

you by everything around you.

Everything.

And, everyone.

In that instant in which you wake up,

how will

you emerge?

Driving down Route 33,

at this very moment,

I make my choice:

I choose to be the kind of person

who swerves to miss caterpillars.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author
Published in "Wild Life: New and Selected Poems" 

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Eclipsing

Image: origin unknown

“Wear no one’s shadow,”

said the Sun,

throwing off the dark

night of the day.

The light you most seek

must be your own,

not a celestial arriving

or re-incarnation of stories

that have outgrown

their telling-time -

These are Earth bound only

to re-mind you of

your own forgotten power

of illumination.

Here.

Here in your vulnerability.

Here in your broken-heartedness.

Here is where you should

Look.

Everything that has ever cracked

you open has served its purpose.

All light wants to get out into the world.

When I watch you,

I cannot help but wonder

if the sorrow residing behind 

your water-pooled eyes isn't the

cry for help from the grieving torch 

that you hid 

under a belly-scorched bushel 

long ago.

You must end this eclipsing of Self.

When?

When will it be alright for you to shine?

I cannot help but think

that the time

is now.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author
Published in "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"
Talking Waters Press

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