portals

“Utterly, breathtakingly beautiful … sublime.”“A tender and powerful interplay between the inner life and the outer landscape.”

There is a door between me and the world.  This door is of two faces; Janus-like,  it guards the goings-out and comings-in…There is a door that opens to my heart.  This door is of two minds; it longs for love,  and stands ajar on golden hinges, hopeful   that the longed-for love will come again…
The New York Times Spelling Bee attracts a large following of enthusiastic word lovers who delight in the daily challenge of ferreting out a list of from a seemingly-random array of seven letters. A handful of Bee solvers delights in the challenge of composing poetry, essays, and more with words from the daily game. Portals compiles a selection of work by one of these “Hive poets” known as “peregrine from the rocky shore.” This volume, the third in a series, presents more than 150 poems (some not previously published) that explore our relationship with the natural world, as well as meditations on memory, solitude, and love. Readers who have come to appreciate peregrine’s poetry will be delighted to find 68 sonnets in this volume, along with the earliest poems in the Bartlett Bay series.

Portals | poems by peregrinesoftcover, 6x9 (15x23 cm), 243 pages, October 2024ISBN 979-8-87-543643-7   9798875436437
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Selected poems from Portals

Paradise (A sonnet of the commonplace)

There’s glory in the blue jay’s startling wing:It flashes cobalt, ivory, slate, and greyas it wheels, and stoops, and flies away,and lends its radiance to— oh, everything,as if it scattered sapphires here and there:in violets springing up where snow had been,in the grey dove’s iridescent sheen,in crocuses and scilla everywhere—Heaven — paradise — does not existbeyond the sky, but in the here and now,in greening grass— a newly-leafed out bough—in how the firs emerge from morning mist.   Perfection may be found in simple things,   as in the startling blue of blue jays’ wings.

Toccata

Flocks of blackbirds rise to fly at last:Countless wingbeats, swift and sure and fasttattoo the air: summer’s done and past—
Flocks of blackbirds, finally on the wingover field and forest, flickeringin their millions over everything—
Flocks of blackbirds fill the leaden sky:In taut arrays they whirl and wheel and flyas if they shared a pact: This fast, this high—
Flocks of blackbirds stop to rest and feed:Potato fields, rye and barley seed,wind-strewn corn and fruits of joe-pye weed—
Flocks of blackbirds fly from winter’s freeze,sweep past taunting crows in leafless trees,follow on the wings of wild geese—
Flocks of blackbirds leave me far below:Atop the hill, I wait to watch them go,but cannot see them for the falling snow—