The Ides of July

It was autumn when 
summer faded into spring
we missed a hard winter
the ground was still hard
good to trudge more topsoil to the beds
past early blueberries about to flower
down to the raspberry canes
and big raised beds for cucumbers 
that need manure
then parsnips for the winter roasts
it used to be April now it’s March
when the first daffodils drooped
their beauty spent
mountain beavers moved their burrow
to another neighbor’s land
and now the year has turned again
we can see the end of summer

Richard M Russell © Dick Russell
            July 15, 2022

 Midsummer

crops all sown

seeds all started

shadows leave no marks

Summer pauses 

after a six-month climb

it’s seven at night and the sun’s still high

there are finches feeding on firm shiny kale

leaving leaves punctured like a colander

after eight and a robin’s still singing

an osprey fishes Brown’s Bay

nine at night you can write without light

planning tomorrow

first peas culled for a salad 

strawberries again

some starts aborted 

new ones started 

Donal kicked his slippers off

staggered on bare feet

swiveled swaggered high stepped side stepped

celebrated with the Street

Midsummer’s come 

uncertain starlight

silhouettes treetops swaying 

while the moon remembers its way

July 1st 2022

Richard M Russell © Dick Russell

 Poem for Joanna

how can i tell of my silence      with words?

(a radio telescope

a gaunt contraption of sheds

& very many grids of cable  

     imagine a telescope dish

the diameter of the earth

imagine probing the furthest areas of the universe)

energy

as in quasars        suns         within molecules

& my sun !

my ENERGY

bursts

a crescendo

       is a quasar

a thing of legend

but quietly goes the air

my breath

my strokes of hand

mushrooms in dank places

lightened by dawn

Joanna has never heard the sonic hiss

there is a smell of breakfast

a stream leaping down stones

which among the grasses

is the ancient one...?

keeper of grass legend

or among water

which drop?

Joanna

      your legs are beautifully long

      but you are too big for Rodin...

come at me...

i say you are too big

but Rodin is dead anyhow

perhaps of lesser legged women

(i talk thus when i am tired

     or i am enigmatic...

        later I will try to find heron imagery

my verse will walk on stilts

my arm on white stains black

i write my blackness with light

were i no poet

an astronomer i'd be

& I would hunt

the quark

Dick Russell

                                        First published in Wolfprints, 1971

 At Sunset

There's work 

and then there's

poetry

There's work to make a home

takes daylight labor to please household gods

When birds sing at sunset

Persephone is near

She drives the fuse that impels pea flowers

ever higher

As dusk falls and bedtime slippers hit the floor

Athena's owl hunts in long shadows from the sun

Refreshed memories rekindle feeling

Fast fading fiery ribbons cloud the sky

weighed down by descending night

Twilight lingers longer a few days more

bathing in the fragrance of cool evening scents

then Summer will be here

and Spring

will fade away

again.

  Dick Russell

       (C) 

June 19th 2022

 

For Jean Jennings Bartik*

Knowledge is just a can of beans

or a bottle of vintage wine

or a London taxi-driver’s knowledge

or anything that can be described

and poetry’s just another kind of code

written in language most understand

enjoying rhythmic ambiguity

iambic meter often in demand

you wouldn’t use a poem to drive a machine

that understands only tens complement arithmetic

and Boolean algebra

proceeding step-wise with constant increment

yet the idea of what a machine can do is part of the poem 

unscrolling through time

from standing stones to rolling wheels

flying

while it’s hard to compute philosophy

which curves in time haphazardly

not like simply counting beans

the art in it is to code it well

*(who programmed the ENIAC, first US electronic computer, and was a senior editor at Auerbach Publishers, a loose-leaf subscription service, where I worked before moving to Minnesota to join Cray Research, Inc. in 1976)

Richard M Russell © Dick Russell

May 4th 2022, 2023