EDITOR’S NOTE: Gregory Longshore is a formal poet who lives in Central Florida and spent a few days in April in a cabin in Ellijay. “I’ve been so taken with the North Georgia mountains, the trees, and the wildlife that I was inspired to write a couple of poems,” he said.
BORING
I wonder whence came all this gath’ring dust
along the outer logs—the cabin wall;
a silent ear can hear the gentle thrust,
of something within wriggle, maybe crawl.
And then emerges, buzzing, hoving bee:
She holds position, angles each discrete;
a perfect mechanism stares at me
of shiny chitin, fuzz, and tiny feet.
She must’ve bored her home into the wood,
a carpenter extant I never knew;
she’s not alone, a dotting neighborhood
of other homes each circular and true
all punctuate this edifice I thought
was just a boring wall of beam and knot.
SAMARAS
The spinning seeds fall ‘neath my steady foot;
they’ve spiraled down from limbs, from scaling trees
that hide within the loam their holding root.
Anonymous, this species brings me ease,
with drooping, jagged leaves I can’t discern,
in pillars rising in the rushing breeze.
The slope and gravel test, yet I must earn
with every step my balance ‘long this trail
to reach the drawing place of my concern:
A vantage higher up yet lifts the veil
that, deeper down, obscures the falling wedge
of sunset’s light, now ebbing, dimming pale.
The canvas of the bark begins to edge
the brightly pigments of the falling day
beyond the canopies, then starts to dredge
up dark strokes of the eve. I walk away
and trudge, return, alone in dusky gloom
to safer, flatter depths where I survey
completed night, as silent as a tomb.
The birds of branch have quietened for now,
their songs to cant again with dawning’s bloom.
Come morn I watch samaras spin, endow
the mountain with their bounty of the bough.
-GREGORY LONGSHORE