Ailsa Steinert

Hubble

For some of us poems 
do not thrive nor breathe
without root, sprout, blossom.
Sky opens behind the winter
berry and each leaf of grass.

Your telescope’s curiosity
finds other galaxies, other 
black holes and, all of a 
sudden, dislocates wonder
from a particular scale.

Asphalt Raveling In Lockdown

After dark the salamanders cross empty
roads in Maine…a lone coyote walks
San Francisco. Someone saw a fisher cat,
feral, bristling, here on Lincoln Street.

When passers by grow scarce, birdsong fills
everywhere…sparrows, beneath
aria of cardinal, chickadee. The crow
seated on a tombstone flicks his tail and caws.

Pushed off by burgeoning leaves and wind
that tears and scatters, blossoms spill
from the cherry tree. The robin cocks his head,
listens for grubs that move beneath the grass.

A panther stalks Paris streets…
goats untether a Welsh town.
Pressed up against stillness, wild
breaks through to breathe.

Ailsa Kennedy Steinert lives in Manchester, Massachusetts and taught English for many years at the Pingree School. She was a long-time member of the Workshop for Publishing Poets in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Her work has appeared in the Comstock Review, Orion, The Larcome Review, the Saltmarsh Press anthology Rough Place Plain: Poems of the Mountains, the Audubon Society’s Sanctuary, in an anthology of poems on Alzheimer’s and on-line in Blue Ocean Institute’s Sea Stories. She was a finalist in Inkwell’s 2007 poetry contest.