A Bird Sings After the Rain

A redbird in love with late summer
honors its recording contract with the universe.
It sings while the sky is still gray,
while drops of rain still fall
to form temporary museum pieces,
puddles reflecting impressionistic scenes
stippled by the softest of winds
that ushered in the storm last hour.
I sit in my open garage at the end of a road
and listen to the notes seed the air with ideas
of how the bird thinks the day should proceed.
I cannot read such music or analyze the score.
I can only listen, as any patron of the arts,
to that which transcends time and space
and yet is present for me now,
sitting in the woods and hoping that my life
will contain many more songs
with hope always the trusted refrain.
I am old, but my soul does not mind
the gentle disciple of cleansing rain.

~William Hammett

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Etaoin Shrdlu

Hot type, slug type, linotype,
you, baby, were more than filler text,
more than something to complete a line
when the newsroom wanted deadline.
You were sweet, fruit that was ripe.
There was me, there was you,
and you were anything but etaoin shrdlu.

No error was King Cnut and clan,

no proofing mistake at the end

or when the dance began,

Neither placeholder nor old headline,

it was girl meets boy, boy meets world,

for me an entirely different point of view,

never wrangled or tangled up in blue.

 

Looking at water, staring at the moon,

gazing at the mirror over the bar

after inhaling a favorite psychic tune,

there was always something fresh, something new.

Rope in my veins, flowers in bloom, my back pages

were so much younger than the old hag’s groom.

You were a sonnet, not etaoin shrdlu.

 

Nobody understood, nobody understood,

or so we said on a philosophical stool

while reminiscing rainwater that had disdained our sieve.

For the first time I knew how to live,

and because of you I was nobody’s fool.

Quantum entanglement is probably the why.

You were literature’s kiss, scansion true,

not some bibliographic etaoin shrdlu.

~Willim Hammett

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