tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84525256526776427132012-01-30T17:41:03.595-08:00Original poetry written in and about rural Thailand.Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comBlogger471100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-70778719728703315472012-01-28T20:02:00.000-08:002012-01-30T17:41:03.610-08:00

Dressed in white and black like formal bartenders, the seven-man funeral band blares, bleats, thumps and pings its way through an ageless dirge. They sit around a seven foot square table - made more to sit upon than at - in the middle of an open dirt space that serves as driveway and grassless yard. At 10 am the heat is building. A PA microphone, dead-center on the table, adds distortion

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-16063255268874527462012-01-13T19:32:00.000-08:002012-01-15T02:14:16.050-08:00

I wind the elastic band until it knots and double knots as taut, tumescent and unworldly as a body builder’s pose. I put the frail thing with springy legs and buttons for wheels on the road headed into the wind, and release the red, plastic prop. The toy waggles and takes to the air. The little boy in me, beside me, behind me watches after it in exultation until the elastic relaxes, the

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-60187274468372944952011-12-28T20:56:00.001-08:002011-12-28T23:22:51.859-08:00

In the early morning calm when the sun is still low, the sparse rice plants,planted only a week ago, are thin green etchings growing out of a silver mirror. It’s a timeless scene of hope laid bare and a beginning wish for another new year. FG 12/29/2011

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-9055300098317741812011-12-15T19:12:00.000-08:002011-12-16T02:46:47.949-08:00

The rice field looks like a golf course. A gentle loamb* puffs out a plastic bag tied to a stick about a five iron downwind. Where I grew up the wind is now racing across snow fields with the cruelty of a minister whipping himself in his dark closet . . . but not here. I toss a pinch of grass in the air to judge which way the wind is blowing and see Takhli’s golden Buddha looking down at

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-1138763511852450032011-12-10T19:43:00.000-08:002011-12-10T19:43:26.975-08:00

Towards the end, my wife’s father was so emaciated and drawn he was as hard to look at as the concentration camp prisoners Ike made every German in town come out to see. He died a home death on my beautiful, blue tile floor within a circle of brothers, cousins, wife and friends. I came out a minute before he died and was transfixed by his one good eye trying to follow me in the same way I

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-79036486034534927312011-12-01T17:39:00.001-08:002012-01-05T02:41:23.872-08:00

The big jet banks left on final to Jeddah. We’re still fifteen miles from the airport but below me I see a compound lit by grain-of-wheat bulbs in a desert of darkness. This is a memory I often have at night while following my glide path to sleep. I roll over in bed. The big jet levels off, slows and slows until I am in a deep forgetful sleep and we land. A few monks are up long before

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-74384102074126210752011-11-24T15:25:00.000-08:002011-11-24T15:25:04.751-08:00

We have a little white puppy named Nam Too-umb because she showed up with the Thai flood. She was only three days old on 12 October when we escaped Ayutthaya and came here. This afternoon as I sipped vodka and listened to The Rolling Stones, Beam, my wife's five year old granddaughter, came into my room dressed in her red-checkered school skirt, and pigtails, and asked me, “Where are Nam

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comBangkok, Thailand13.7234186 100.4762319000000213.492911600000001 100.17089640000002 13.9539256 100.78156740000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-41905489469528083022011-11-14T17:32:00.000-08:002011-11-17T00:33:31.371-08:00

Let me die a poet and not just an honest man, for truth dissembles with masks of love and war and presses us to go, to dance and even to take a stand. But a poem is a quiet stream that flows past summery banks to a private garden where, in the meanest world, all can come and understand. Let me die a poet and not just an honest man. FG Nov. 15, 2011 All rights reserved by the author

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-53299641238587730862011-11-02T01:42:00.000-07:002011-11-02T01:42:18.776-07:00

It starts imperceptibly, just a line of shadow at the side of the road, but within two hours, it grows to bathtub-deep water. It infiltrates between houses, gerrymanders whole neighborhoods, and consolidates puddle to puddle like quick silver only to consolidate again. An archipelago of assorted junk dots the lawn, but in the evening, when no one is looking, it, too, is gone. In the

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-27045316942771226462011-09-28T05:47:00.000-07:002011-09-28T05:47:24.277-07:00

All day the rain beyond my balcony has been indecisive. At times, it seems about to make a sentence then breaks down to a broken phrase without antecedent or agreement. My wife calls. There has been a flood at the hospital and she has seen a hospital bed float by her shop with an old woman still in it hooked up to an IV. Is it raining there, she asks. I look beyond my balcony and see those

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-29032786272714916162011-09-19T21:09:00.000-07:002011-09-19T21:09:00.656-07:00

The old pictures and clippings are history, I suppose, but sitting here in Thailand and perhaps to those who were actually there they seem more in the way of poetry that’s connected to a time and place. And if you step back, the question of what a poem really is seems to come into focus? Here’s what I think: A poem’s job is to describes the nature of poetry itself in fewer and fewer words

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-55861311237990945002011-09-16T02:54:00.001-07:002011-09-16T17:12:39.052-07:00

They’re big spikes like the ones in the Statue of Liberty’s crown, and freshly painted an industrial-wall shade of green when I bring them home. But nothing rots as fast as a banana, and overnight one on the bottom yellows up and it’s peel begins to look like the only hatchling in a nest of green. I eat this one by snapping off its cue-stick tip the way elephants do, and the peel falls

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-79823011009225751392011-09-08T00:41:00.000-07:002011-09-09T03:57:34.183-07:00

Ayutthaya, Thailand An IReport filed by a retiree 7 Sept. 2011 Around 4:30 – 5:15 pm as seen from his sixth-floor balcony The wind comes like a blur from left to right, racing like the skater at the end of the whip. A big round momma tree below begins rollicking like a disco dancer with one arm up twirling a lasso and yelling “Hello, boys!” Slim slips of trees, not up to her waist salaam in

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-76733652501902310692011-09-01T22:26:00.001-07:002011-09-07T00:53:56.394-07:00

There is a station near sleep that only the old know. The downcast fan on the dresser slowly turns its face “no,” the window I can walk through is open to six-story air and I lie on the bed at four in the afternoon and climb down the evolutionary tree to the mind of the great apes, to the mind of large mammals, lower and lower until I come to the brain stem mind of a fish floating in his

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-86306714775705244802011-08-29T03:07:00.001-07:002011-08-30T00:33:07.774-07:00

As a boy I was taught not to point, but pointing seems a necessity now. You need a pointing device to run a computer, and even when I order food, I point to a picture on a placemat menu. The kid in a paper hat then orders it by pointing to a touch-screen. This picture pointing makes life easier – there’s no need to be polite. But after I’ve sucked the chicken bones and put them back in the

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-91937888160780328882011-08-22T02:20:00.001-07:002011-08-22T21:12:09.491-07:00

Her ears are flowery flutes peeping out from a vine behind her slender neck. Earrings may hide the belly button gnarl pasted to the side of another woman’s head but my wife’s in-your-face ears are made for dream catchers which I see dangling there even when she’s wearing none. And at night when we nuzzle like bunnies in the tall grass, I feel safe for she is ever vigilant and if danger is

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-40232906616488765012011-08-13T20:57:00.000-07:002011-08-14T01:42:25.300-07:00

It was a little machine that whirred and churned like a vending machine, but contained a white-hot star, which if you got near enough to the TV tray it sat on, had a new-car smell to it. It was mostly plastic – and that then was new – and so little used that its cord still had stiff kinks from the packing case. My mother held the remote which was tethered by a cord, and she often pushed the

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-57499625117784548112011-08-09T18:22:00.001-07:002011-08-09T18:22:56.045-07:00

I miss my children, not as adults, but how they were as kids when I had to leave for Paradise. Money has nothing to do with Paradise, of course, but it has everything to do with leaving. Adults know this, but children who get tucked in at night never do. They believe fathers go to Paradise to be happy without them. The morning I left, I took them down one more time to the south end of the

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-16689842493597263212011-08-05T03:39:00.000-07:002011-08-05T03:39:12.286-07:00

My pumpkin colored, plastic razor sleds the white snow fields of my cheeks, edges across the narrow rope bridge below my nose, transverses the intricacy of cleft and chin, and when I jut my jaw out hoes up my neck as if it was scratching the belly of an old dog who’d rather stay in now. FG 4 August 2011 All right are reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood. Many poems seem like

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-77768430324034434542011-07-22T18:57:00.000-07:002011-07-22T18:57:14.835-07:00

At the supper hour, a low, slate-gray sky keeps the fire-breathing dragons and half-bird/half-man Thai creatures crouching under the many roofs of Ayutthaya. In the distance, beyond the stupa, I watch cars corkscrew up and corkscrew down in a round parking garage. From here the whole thing looks like a child’s toy, but I know it’s a marvel of engineering, no angles, just grades and circles

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-1846403499131740002011-07-19T19:49:00.000-07:002011-07-19T20:13:58.902-07:00

Driving home from Nashua, I use to go by the old Amoskeag mills. The water powered looms had long gone by then and the four-story brick buildings were derelict and waiting for renewal or total destruction. My Aunt Edna spent her entire working life in these mills which were once America’s sweat-shops, and as I drove by I imagined I could see a dead face looking out at me longingly from every

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-13341133838995609442011-07-09T19:40:00.003-07:002011-07-19T19:44:34.822-07:00

With legs pasted together, she rides sidesaddle in back of the taxi motorsi, weaving through the river of dammed cars in the Thai city street. She is a school-girl wearing a white blouse and a short black skirt which makes her legs look longer, if legs she has at all. Riding almost since birth, she is in her element and zigs and zags and almost stops in and out of traffic with fish-eyes

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-86646700866181280622011-07-07T19:21:00.000-07:002011-07-08T16:39:07.079-07:00

For My Nana Maude When I was young, my grandmother knew everything about me but I knew precious little about her. It seems she dog-eared every page of my life for future reference and embarrassment. It was unfair, and so I began keeping a file on her. When I was eight, I only knew that Goffstown was a place full of water that undercut snow banks in the spring, that ran in brooks that

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-91695414277897102312011-06-22T02:50:00.000-07:002011-07-01T21:48:43.098-07:00

Take you average road side stand that pops up in the fall, you know the one with wide ascending stairs of pumpkins or baskets of apples, and cut it off just below the hips so it goes whomp and lands almost flat on the ground. Now people-size it, paint it in an enamel green and cover the front with some chicken wire. Set the whole she-bang down on a July Sunday afternoon behind home plate.

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-74918313915145255132011-06-12T19:11:00.000-07:002011-06-14T18:41:38.207-07:00

Sometime after sixty in the spring, a man looking out his window to an empty sidewalk that leads to the rest of the world realizes that home is where you hang your hat is finally coming true. Sometime after sixty in the fall, a woman cleaning wet leaves from her bird bath, although God knows why in this cold and damp, looks up to an empty window and realizes that she’s gone and left her

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-45775635954683959232011-05-29T19:33:00.000-07:002011-07-01T21:51:01.695-07:00

By ten pm the tropical rains have wrung themselves out in a thousand torrents off awnings, tarpaulins and the plastic sheeting of the night market up and down Grand, and the street has become a pixilated profusion of color with choke points of wheels, feet, and cars that only an Impressionist could capture. At the center of this riot and swirl comes little Cucumber. Already as big as a

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-989460814961874382011-05-23T00:48:00.000-07:002011-06-05T16:57:16.652-07:00

In the morning after you leave, our bath towels, yours and mine, once plump and proud and folded to an edge-on “e” now hang by their necks like dead chickens from pegs outside the bathroom door. But as I wait for your return, in this afternoon’s soft Thai light, the same bath towels now drape in flowing folds and take on lovely hues of blue and rose May 22, 2011 All rights reserved

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-16464170875789510312011-05-06T18:28:00.000-07:002011-06-05T17:13:31.044-07:00

Our first appliance was the humble fan that moved unseen currents of air toward the consumer more efficiently than Pharo's slave-boy powered fronds. Driven by direct current when electricity was new, we marveled more though at seeing through the solid spinning blades, however darkly, to the world beyond. FG 6 MAY 2011 All rights reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-12334366103278041972011-05-03T23:24:00.001-07:002011-06-05T17:15:00.499-07:00

(Ayutthaya, Thailand) Learning a new language is like a wave moving from ocean to shore. New words, drawn by the moon, rise in our consciousness only to ease gently back into the unfathomable deep as the wave passes. But in time this wave of words curls and gains velocity until it smashes onto the rocks in an éclat of foam and spray and we claim a new continent as our own. FG 4 May 2011

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-81893164925193967082011-04-07T21:08:00.000-07:002011-06-05T17:17:32.075-07:00

Ayutthaya, Thailand There is no rehearsal for life in any school unless it is after supper on a bright stage in front of an empty and darkened gym. Here the future seems captured just like the past and we can move along the story board at will. Occasionally, a voice from the deep dark out front says, “Again, please!” We know it’s the social science teacher, but if she wants it again,

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-43388601232800994512011-04-02T00:31:00.000-07:002011-06-05T17:18:26.287-07:00

 Ayutthaya, Thailand The half-acre lawns and houses of my middle age have gone in a downward spiral toward smaller and smaller chambers until I now live in an atelier, if a hotel room on the fourth floor of a nine story building can be called one. Still, the Internet brings me the world and my Thai girl of a wife, who has never known the expansive western need for space, modestly changes her

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-83241373896749562542011-03-11T22:07:00.000-08:002011-06-05T17:19:35.675-07:00

Thai Beam sitting on a low table under her great grandmother’s high new pavilion. Behind her is her Thai great grandmother smiling on a low slung hammock. And behind her great grandmother is the fair arc of rice that holds us all . . . and all to come. FG March 12, 2011All rights reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood.

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-24435476314882637712011-03-09T02:12:00.000-08:002011-06-05T17:20:17.505-07:00

Unlike wooden blocks strewn in a child’s room, the debris field around the ancient wat, is too sacred to pick up or restore to order. Huge stones and falling-in walls of brick are now left for generations of hands-off perpetual care. The ground is uneven, too, and requires care when walking. Here and there broken statues of Buddha are necklaced with plastic, yellow ribbons. They were fastened

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-23037177829509984952011-02-15T18:41:00.000-08:002011-06-05T17:22:16.144-07:00

 Chong Khae, Thailand Under a single spot light my father would play basketball with me and the kids in town well into the dark autumn night. But toward ten he’d simply take the ball and go in. No amount of Aw come ons would ever change his mind, and a few seconds later the spot light would go out. Guys would upright their bikes and still sweating pedal off mumbling. “He always does it when he’s

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-55841319571038494262011-01-28T02:16:00.000-08:002011-06-05T17:24:05.347-07:00

Nearing sixty years on the halftones of my classmates are sedate and in their solemn thumbnails arranged in rows and columns they seem more a cemetery layout than a glossy year book page. Under each tombstone is an epitaph of sorts. So and so leaves a broken gym locker or an unwanted seat in Mrs. Zeller’s home room to someone now no one remembers or cares to know why the gifter thought the gift

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-8278773434671164372011-01-19T02:43:00.000-08:002011-06-05T17:25:34.818-07:00

(Chong Khae, Thailand) As a boy in school if I thought of death at all it was as the last aerial in a fireworks display whose report was so loud and flash so bright . . . it had to be the end. As a man in middle age, if I thought of death at all it was to shudder that I could not protect the ones I loved from the evils of the world or worse . . . from those evils crouched within. Tonight in an

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-44096982428185135782010-10-08T02:39:00.000-07:002011-06-05T17:28:16.333-07:00

(Chong Khae, Thailand)My Thai mother-in-law, who is younger than I am, rakes trash into a pile the same way we would rake leaves. She is diabetic, illiterate, and when my wife leaves a cell phone with her, she has to get someone else to answer when it rings. She hunkers down on a low shoe-shine bench and begins to light the trash. I walk around the corner and close windows to keep smoke out. I

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-83801408638597970712010-09-23T01:06:00.000-07:002011-06-05T17:29:27.467-07:00

 (Chong Khae, Thailand) Suspended from the eave, the orchid lives like a hermit crab in a hollowed out coconut shell. It sends its clean-as-a-flagpole stem skyward until the arc of gravity bends it back down toward the heavy bloom that drips with electric red amid blown apart pastels as breathtaking as the nebula that hangs on Orion’s belt a million billion miles away. 9/23/10 FG

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-50718271894021929522010-02-24T19:24:00.001-08:002011-06-06T17:40:37.124-07:00

Reprinted here for the newly unemployed 1. Perfect your wretchedness. A missing limb or two or a pathetic Infant dosed with laudanum To appear dazed & stupid Can certainly improve your Prospects if God has so blest you. 2 Make no eye contact & stay low. Your patron should nearly trod on You & behold thou at the last possible Moment like a new magic lantern slide Whose impact is not beauty but

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-67472541764423321812010-02-22T21:03:00.000-08:002011-06-06T17:41:06.115-07:00

There were times reading Treasure Island Or even thinking about the book that I could smell the sea and hear the hawsers Strain and make the old Hispaniola creek and Groan in a fair wind and following sea. I could understand Squire’s ridiculous buffoonery Or see full well the invisible hand of Long Johns’ Self-serving greed for what it was. But if RLS spent three hours surfing the web In my

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-17917008475880188412010-01-17T18:04:00.000-08:002011-06-06T17:42:47.867-07:00

Mrs. Brown, who called us creatures, Once asked the class: which would you Prefer to be - a novelist or a poet? It’s the type of question I now know School teachers use to fill up the dead air Of gray, rainy New England days. I said poet because it required less work. I suppose I wanted to make her mad, but In an unschooled way I was right: Writing verse is not really work at all. Mrs. Brown (

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-1536857650734376512009-12-23T19:48:00.000-08:002011-06-06T17:43:50.309-07:00

It’s that magic half-hour When color and distance deepen And every photographer knows his Pictures will look as good as a View Master slide. My wife’s uncle pushes an old bike Up against his tin shed of a house. He’s 80 and too unsteady to ride far So for the most part he just pushes the bike. The dogs, too many to count, waiting to be fed, Gather at his feet, milling about with tails wagging

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-33531838008765368672009-05-01T19:43:00.000-07:002009-08-12T20:32:16.881-07:00

Are we just the sum of ourLikes and dislikes refined year on yearWith the help of others?And are likes and dislikesThe same as the phraseAll things seen and unseenWhich seems to slope upIn my mind like anEscalator which we rideUp and down without effort?No, likes and dislikesIs just another floorWhere shoppers carryAway a raft of thingsThat aren’t quite true.I stop in front of a bank of TVsWhere

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-54251226080406379702009-02-28T19:52:00.000-08:002011-06-06T17:49:08.952-07:00

The houses of my youth had musical names Like bungalow and saltbox or Garrison, cottage, and cape. They weren’t mass-produced by Crews of framers with pneumatic nailers, But stick-built by men in bib overalls Who smelled of sweat, smoked Lucky Strikes And muttered cut once but measure twice Whenever they knew I was around. These houses were never flipped and Only changed hands when the old man

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-40510750775789063932009-02-13T17:59:00.000-08:002009-03-12T18:25:25.154-07:00

Make Me The MysteryDrop me LordAs I drop Thee,And in the down ofGentle swallowMake me the mysteryOf your tomorrow.May, AgainMayWitness likeApril’s sunMelt the silent snowsOf all our ThanksgivingsAnd lead lost childrenTo play in summery fields,Again.Forrest Greenwood

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-43879968502002642072009-02-13T17:53:00.000-08:002011-06-06T17:50:45.808-07:00

In fall they leave our lives Like aged parents given over the Care of others. In winter they stand back Like dormant dreams and Let us pass. In spring they reach Like giant nerves to touch A rising sun. In summer they flourish Like families and yield The most exquisite truth Of hardwood and seed. All rights reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood.

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8452525652677642713.post-6169634135577767032008-02-21T01:55:00.000-08:002011-06-06T17:44:59.240-07:00

The irrigation canal, As big as a New England river, slides by Across the street from the clutch of houses Where ours stands in a sad jungle Worn thread bare by generations Of impoverished cousins who live In corrugated sheds that build heat During the day which only a Puritan or A Swede might relish or survive. Man made, it looks to be a river A child might draw: green grassy Banks and tame

Forresthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13898028206624282509noreply@blogger.com