🌈 R🌹🌊 🦋 🌿 R 🌙 𓅊

Der Garten

The day the winds went underground I gasped for breath, Did not you, oxygen gone from the chest wall, Nostrils pinched in the spare weather, strictest Sort of equilibrium at street corners?

It was a pity. Who could walk in the hills now Or run for a train? The water in a storm Ran down the sides of buildings and the bark of trees Straight down, like tears.

On that first day, it was not so desperate. I remember though short of breath Thinking with relief, in fact, in the dense quiet, Fall will be quiet.

But more and more as the streets clogged with traffic And the smog of the city's production lay in its ways, One could notice persons burrowing, hearts hammering, Toward the risks of the wind.

📷 Wynand van Poortvliet

📷 Mark Olsen

An old Stone in a Field

Apart from branches in courtyards and small stones The countryside is beyond me. I can go along University Avenue from Rochester to Sobrante And then the Avenue continues to the Bay.

Often I think of the dry scope of foothill country, Moraga Hill, Andreas, Indian country, where I was born And where in the scrub the air tells me How to be born again.

Often I think of the long rollers Breaking against the beaches All the way down the coast to the border On bookish cressets and culverts blue and Mediterranean.

There I break In drops of spray as fine as letters Blown high, But waking am the shore they break upon.

Both the dry talkers, those old Indians, And the dry trollers, those old pirates From around the Horn, say something, But mostly in the courts it's louder talking Gavel rapping, and procedural dismays.

Still where we are, and where we call and call. The long rollers of the sea come in As if they lived here. The dry Santa Ana Sweeps up the town and takes it for a feast. Then Rochester to El Sobrante is a distance No longer than my name.

📷 Sebastian Herrmann

📷 Suyash Batra

Alsener Landschaft

Our bower is in a book, Our hill is not in flower, We are parched by the hill's look, We are spent by its hour.

The hose our strongest power, Our crier to the rose, And weariness our sower, And thorn what grows.

Yet tell at the day's close We tend a plot in spell Where leaf, where petal shows How print is arable.

📷 Bryant Aardema