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    A Flock of Words
    A Flock of Words
    A Flock of Words
    Ebook105 pages37 minutes

    A Flock of Words

    By Burt Porter

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    About this ebook

    These poems seem to have been made on an old workbench with simple tools by someone who has been making such things for a very long time.
    William Gilson

    In keeping with his previous poems, Burt Porter speaks to his longtime experience in the hills of Vermont, at once an observer and participant, with comforting familiarity and abundant curiosity. His remembrances and observations of the world around him are tinged with a tempered longing, yet embrace acceptance of the natural flow of things, in history, in nature, and in life. In traditional forms, Porters poems both ground the reader in the patience of witnessing day-to-day life while encouraging our imaginations to take flight.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMar 30, 2011
    ISBN9781462000739
    A Flock of Words
    Author

    Burt Porter

    Burt Porter holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Arts from Wesleyan University. He is a well-known local fiddler and ballad singer who has lived in the same old farmhouse in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom for the last fifty years. His companions are Lindsay Knowlton, also an accomplished poet, and his two sons and their families.

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      Book preview

      A Flock of Words - Burt Porter

      Summer

      The Wilson’s Snipe

      On summer nights I wake to hear

      Him tumbling through the moonlit sky,

      Pinions spread to make the air

      Sing an undulating cry.

      I’ve seen him spiral up to soar

      High above the spinning ground,

      Then turn to fall towards earth once more

      In an ecstasy of sound.

      On summer nights when the moon is full

      In my dreams I rise and fly

      High above the pasture hill

      To sing by falling through the sky.

      Perseverance

      I picked a daisy in the field

      With petals white and fair;

      I plucked the petals one by one

      And tossed them in the air.

      I chanted that she loved me

      And that she loved me not;

      What the final petal told me

      Was not what I had thought,

      So I cast that faithless flower

      Into the summer wind

      And picked another daisy

      And began all over again.

      On the Porch

      I sat out on the old porch swing

      On a warm spring afternoon,

      Playing on a mandolin

      Some well-worn, half-forgotten tune

      When suddenly a startled finch

      Thudded against the window pane,

      Dropped down to the boards below

      Then fluttered up and fell again.

      The fallen bird could not have known

      That air through which he’d always flown

      Could so abruptly betray his trust

      And turn to something hard as stone.

      Then soaring low, a sharp-shinned hawk

      Seized the addled bird, and flew

      With rapid wings that sliced to shreds

      The air that he went slashing through.

      Carousel

      For Colton

      I recall when I was small I went to ride

      Upon a merry-go-round—a swirl of wild

      And dream-like beasts. A pony in mid-stride

      With up-reared hooves, painted to please a child,

      Bore me up and down and ’round and ’round.

      I closed my eyes and in my childish mind,

      The music spun me high above the ground

      Until the common world was left behind.

      I cantered over hills of cloud and through

      Fantastic, shadowed valleys, gray and white;

      I loped my pony over plains of blue,

      Gleaming in my dazzled, inward sight,

      And when the pony slowed and I got down,

      I staggered on the dizzy, spinning ground.

      The Cup

      I came upon a forgotten fence

      Of twisted, rusted wire

      And crossed into a forgotten field

      Of juniper and briar.

      An ancient lilac bush still bloomed

      Upon a gentle knoll;

      The house that once stood there was gone:

      Trees grew in the cellar hole.

      Here and there like old white bones

      Were shards of household ware,

      The only remnants that endured

      Of lives that had flourished there.

      On a mossy, flat foundation stone

      Sat a saucer and a cup;

      Someone had found them still intact

      And so had set them up,

      As if some little flitting bird

      Might fly down from a tree

      To sit and sing expectantly

      For a genteel cup of

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