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.

 In Edinburgh words matter

Shall I reset the margin of the virtual page?
Will it matter?
Won’t they read on watches phones
exercise machines?
Now I’ve tapped the tune on typewriter keys
will words utter
from muses that kept me from the gutter.
In Edinburgh words matter.

I once couldn’t sleep in the chair I was lent
stumbled around found fish and chips
somehow survived in a poetic miasma.
That was when I first met her
who left me retching in the street
in drunken stupor.

In Edinburgh words matter.

Shall I give safe harbor to thoughts of her
extolling virtues beauty intellect 
how a poet with no income
not a welfare bum
alone with a borrowed car
I’d given mine away 
it might have been.

And she carried a bag big enough to suffice
if she had driven away with me that night 
but the friend’s old car wouldn’t start 
needed a new battery 
had to be pushed to the corner
where an auto-shop would open in the morning
and I'd thrown up in frustration and despair
and said goodnight
and goodbye.

In Edinburgh 1972 where words mattered.


copyright (C) Richard M Russell
            Dick Russell, April 2023

 An Hour Before Sunset

For W. S. Merwin

let me hear you flute your song
follow your notes
to remembered smiles
places lit by winter sunlight
or summer cheer
leave out regret
live just this bliss
when hummingbirds work
red blossom on vines 
forever twining upwards
where there’s blue sky 
but grey clouds billow
whitened edges
gleam in sunlight
what friends would mourn
a man so happy 

after his pipe

He’s gone to another world 
impulsive impatient driven by testosterone
he’s passive meditative thoughtful with 
his muse for she is there to 
enfold him in a world 
where even old
they are young
where minds grow larger while bodies shrink
they’re both on a trip to denial
he to his muse she to her trainer
he does gymnastics with her in mind
she does them with him in the gym


copyright (C) Richard M Russell
           Dick Russell

 tryst

Be lean be mean be vigilant
don’t take the bait
when lust overcomes reason
she’s too much to resist
don’t take the bait
though she smiles
don’t touch
just exchange contact
eye to eye
but not yet a wink
                 
                        

                          Copyright (C) Richard M Russell
                                           Dick Russell