Yesterday my friend Kristin and I completed our submission for an Orange County grant that would enable us to commission and perform a song cycle based on my poems. The idea excites me.
Also yesterday, I submitted five pages of verse, as required, to the North Carolina Poetry Society, which offers a weeklong residency at Weymouth (the Weymouth Center for Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines). I’ve stayed there before a few times while working on plays, and I found those weeks productive and pleasant.
Along with the tedious grant application I gave them a few poems, including “Dinosaurs in the Yard”:
Dinosaurs will come and go if you treat them right.
Mornings, I wake to their boasts:
“Look at me! Look at me now!” chirks the chickadee
while a catbird practices twelve-tone scales.
A cardinal robed like a pope
(his reach exceeding his grasp)
locates the birdbath: “Bella! Bella!”
The junco, with her courtesan’s eye,
trills one ironic note like a busted gamba.
Ten thousand throats in a saurian welter
that Plato would love, though your ear
rewrites their ropy chants in a tongue
repurposed for those born in beds,
not nests–those apt to die like swans,
singing.