To a Taoist Hermit

Today   at work in the office
I felt a sudden chill in my heart
you who live alone on the mountain
gathering wood beside a plunging stream
will be boiling white stones for food

I want to bring you a gourd of wine
to cheer you in this time of wind and rain
but the empty mountains are vast
falling leaves fill the paths
how could I find your footsteps

Wei Ying Wu
T'ang Dynasty

translated by David Sen, Dick Russell
revised March 2017, 2023 Dick Russell
Published in Chapman Chinese Issue, Scotland, 1972

 To Rosalind 

         Store Future

no works are better than these codes
embedded in DNA
in blossoms seen 
     soon after solstice
  
though flowers fade
images live on
epochs un-scroll their struggle to survive 

deeds encoded in DNA
                maintained forever
  capable of surviving
        like a warrior
from a hero’s tomb

bringing faint sounds of Homer



copyright © Dick Russell, 2019, 2023

 in less than an hour 
perhaps a few minutes
it was time well spent 
wracking the brain for a suitable stain to put on the page
or was it a wash of pixels on a slate-grey screen
whatever it was it was
wasn't it
it definitely was
a sonnet
not a daub
or a scratch of an itch
in less than an hour 
perhaps a few minutes

By Chirdon Burn I’ll wander where my love and I once walked

alone except for a birdwatcher’s hut by water’s edge where we talked.

And that was where she went no further for she wanted to go on from me

we’d passed a full-fledged tawny owl being mobbed by birds in a tree.

No, you can’t keep it, it’s wild, set it free She’d taken it anyway back to our bothy

from the drystone wall where she found it. We kept it and fed it and then it flew free.

From Allerybank we’d found her from Roughside near enough

was it her, songbirds were trying to kill in the valley of the Cleugh?

In the Borders, cleugh rhymes with snuff and rough.