SATURDAY'S POEM

SHEEP ON THE BROWN HILL
by Dick Jones

There are sheep,
hopeless, round-shouldered clouds
of wool. They have the eyes
of demons

yet the mouths
they clamp round nettles
seem innocent of teeth.
They have the cloven hoof

yet their legs
seem afterthoughts, a child's
charcoal lines
drawn at all four corners.

Knee-high again,
I hang like a casualty
on the barbed-wire fence,
gaping, contemplating

sheep in orbit
around the hilltop house.
No route or destination;
no sense of purpose

to be found within
this witless shifting traffic.
I look for patterns,
signs of navigation.

Sun moves through thin clouds;
wind wraps the house,
sings in wires.
Sheep crop and shuffle

all day long. Nothing alters
on the brown hill.
One generation inhales;
its descendants sigh.

I am an old coat now,
stretched on thorns.
Night slides across and finds me,
purposeless yet blessed.

Dick Jones' bio note reads this way; he says: "Initially wooed by the First World War poets & then seduced by the Beats, I have been exploring the vast territories in between since the age of 15. Fitfully published in a variety of magazines throughout the years of rambling, grand plans for the meisterwerk have been undermined constantly either by a Much Better Idea or a sort of Chekhovian inertia. So I have no prize collection to my name; I have masterminded no radical creative writing programmes in a cutting edge university department; I have edited no recherché poetry magazines with lower case titles. However, recent work has been published in Mipoesias & 3 Candles. For fun & profit, I teach Drama in a progressive school & play bass guitar & bodhran in an Anglo/Celtic dance band. If anyone would like to follow up the poems published here, please check out my weblog at: http://blogs.salon.com/0002065/ "

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to tmmontag@dotnet.com . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

Comments

[Peter]

Ooh, I like this. Just the right touch... beautiful.

I've been on Dick's page before but never looked at his poetry. I was too busy reading his humorous stuff including his computer error signs, which Victoria and I laughed over until we literally cried.