Waking Up in Wales: Old and New Poems

By Jeff Reed

A collection of Jeff Reed's favorite poems spanning 1984 to 2008.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257335626

Book preview

e9781257335626_cover.jpg

Waking Up in Wales

Old and New Poems

Jeff Reed

©2008 Jeff Reed

All Rights Reserved

9781257335626

Cover Art:

The Cottage Girl by Thomas Gainsborough, 1785

The National Gallery of Ireland

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Imago Dei

Kyrie Eleison

Word Rings Widely Running Wild

What You Have Seen Before

Something Creeping Stealthily Through the Weeds

We Walk Along

Still

Shoreline Grain By Grain

Spring Is Done Now Dressing Trees

To A Young Artist

The Cast

Flight in Winter

Snow Tufts Lay Like Islands

Old Stone Something

Back at you

Dance Down Under

Requiem

Alarm

Roi Et

Darwinist

Some Blue Afternoon

Coffee Coop

The Day I Bought A Cane

Morphing Mildly Every Moment By

Saguaro National Monument

Wedding

Undecided Ocean, Wooing Moon

Leap for Leaping’s Love

Somewhere There’s Someone

I Think It Different

Shale Stone Mosaic

There Galactic Furnace, Here Mild Brush

Weeping in Romah

Clock Hands Never Catching

The Ascension Window

Grey Day

Two Purple Flowers

Can’t Go Home Without the Water

Tucson Thorns

Daisies

Onward Christian Soldier

Waking Up in Wales

Around the World

I Crossed Into A Field With Cows

Until Then

At Last

To Mom

Imago Dei

It was good, You said, and so it was

very good, indeed, and all because

You were in the whole of it, and You

are Goodness, whole of what is true.

Your touch leaves a fingerprint behind,

curling maze to treasure for the find.

Buried in the mix of common things,

coded, sitting shy with folded wings,

camouflaged until a poet’s pen

can shoo her from her hiding place and send

the whole flock beating wings upon the sky,

setting free the secrets where they lie,

calling me, You’ve called me, Sir, to play

this treasure hunt in each imago dei.

Kyrie Eleison

...the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words

Romans 8:26

Kyrie, o Kyrie eleison.

Gone again the words to bear my plea.

Please, Word, form the sound my silence prays on.

Make it music, chant the ageless plainsong,

haunting echo calling deep to deep.

Kyrie, o Kyrie eleison.

Stretch it from the stars to my horizon

on the fragile web of light I see;

Please, Word, form the sound my silence prays on.

Be the birds whose chorus in the gray dawn

claims what waited through the night to be.

Kyrie, O Kyrie eleison.

Choreograph the evergreen that sways on

in the winter breeze to sign my need.

Please, Word, form the sound my silence prays on.

Sober Hannah, wordless, was amazed on

feeling first the kick of little feet.

Kyrie, O Kyrie eleison.

Please, Word, form the sound my silence prays on.

Word Rings Widely Running Wild

Word before all words, Whose sound

sings life, rings widely running wild

and tells Itself, Self-sung, verbed noun

now known in the grammar of the exiled child,

words bent, words basic, strain to hold

this flight of melody force unbridled-

song that sang in seven days old

the cosmic cast upon its stage,

crescendoing in a three day hold:

then out! And out a brand new age

where white is given free and stain

is crimsoned. Told