Two Poems for Two Bobs

By J. Drew Lanham, Safina Center Senior Fellow

A WILD NOCTURNE

(A golden shovel poem taken from Robert Bly's “Return to Solitude")

I know the night ,  

the wild way —

hear the buck deer boldly leaping.  

The dark is their comfort.

Silence leans against shadow in a dusky sea

Paths by day unseen open wide as corridors.

On cold starlit nights 

prey falls but there is no grief.

Certain as a tax, comes death,

levied by tooth claw talon—wildcat, owl or bear.

Dawn rings shift change, signals time to return.

Sun rises past sunken moon westward moved;

secrets go to ground, darkness lifts and leaves.

Stopping by Bare Woods on a Foggy Morning

(In honor of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”)

there's something about a winter wood to come — 

even before the solstice slides in 

that reveals the truer thing. Trees bared down to limb and twig.

No longer hiding behind a facade of  leaves. 

Slow creek mirrors the naked truth.

They have no choice but to look.