Walk Aware

           A Poem for January 

              Walking frost covered faded grass
              listening to ravens talking
              conjuring his own fragmented images
              into a schema that portrayed his soul
              he walked past beauty as a scholar might
              debating the state of a man who walks
              insulated from the electric earth
              by shoes that erase the ground's contours

              Above    an orbiting information satellite
              shining like a comet in free-fall space
              over a third of the earth its signals traced
              an intricate web of bat-pitched noise

              Not watching    he fell    laughed to hear the grass
              splinter    crackle in his ear     like static




              © Dick Russell, 2013
              first published in Chapman 39, 1984; Edinburgh
              Editor Joy Hendry