Racing Scarecrows Toward the Morning

Racing Scarecrows Toward the Morning

L. Edgar Otto   07 May, 2013

I walked the rivers of the night alone
a flood in cresting tears my head drooped down
Cursing the wall of pine paths tripping cones
not even the rabid mask rat dare frown

Watering mouth craves yet fears to drown
in seas of memories far from a shore
The razor lighthouse ray a scythe of sound
reflected in his moving eyes encore

Falls the closing curtain all gone before
staring down all taken fore granted sins
Until he screams and runs his key my door
Not shakes but firm on bridges burned my shins

I could not see to read or write his cries
Out of sync my footsteps jump railroad ties

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I am bound as much as broken full blown
some raven rhyme exudes out from my crown
Echoes my marrow hollow empty bones
random walk finds no escape this town

Even while the space of dream comes round
June and the moon then solitude snow owl
For its nest, a word, one hair, swoops down
from nowhere its wings with muscle prowls

Would to God I pass hog pen wallows foul
on the road to Huntingdon near Cambs
Long thru the Barley corn her furrows, plow
as if our strand stands out among the lambs

I heard the mud asleep begin to moan
All the Fens my keep if as hope to own


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Footnote for a call for the Muses:

Perhaps there comes a time when in the channels of constraint and long entrenched lazy but free verse and broken meter habits, solitons in the weirs, the mood transcends the words and pictures at that place where the reader brings as much its life, gains beyond translation, colours that are not seen by light... thus the long nest of our life tho never reaching its perfection  we stumble over form toward some morning light.

Most of my poems, some of which in this style of shadows of forgotten memories as we with feelings set down only to reopen old scars, were written somewhere in the chill and morning dew maybe not to tired to care but never to regain lost time or sleep far from the madding crowd a shan't get home thoughts on a long walk.

Love, it is said, is the most difficult theme because it has been so over done... sonnets are hard... I tried to combine these two things.  That is perhaps the challenge and in the turns of fortune, the logic of it, that another obstacle which in a very strange way nature seemed to interrupt me with the two final lines that took as long as the poem to write again.  Nature it seems can be nearby editor that seems when our hearts find healing words, the tether to her makes our efforts easy and our writing automatic in real time as if our moods deeply alive, perhaps head above the water going down once we have recognized beauty, known sorrow and learned to love...

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