Lorraine Henrie Lins is a Pennsylvania county poet laureate, and serves as the Director of New and Emerging Poets with Tekpoet. She is a founding member of the “No River Twice” poetry performance troupe and the author of five books of poetry, including the forthcoming “Without the Water” (Kelsay Books.) Lins’ work appears in a wide variety of familiar publications and collections, as well as a small graffiti poster in New Zealand. To learn more about this artist, please visit her website: http://www.LorraineHenrieLins.com
Autumn Wasp
Its bump and nudge
around the decomposing hive
dense with flight
cuts the afternoon in half
slender saffron armor
like that of thrown pebbles,
its urgency turns wings linen white
bones’ evening luster
softens to
long notes in its hum, a melody:
spongey, warped and low
spokes knitted across the angle of day
a bed of auric shadows
muffled thick,
pulp, curl, pith, only the queen
endures this change.
Murmuration
Each starling keeps tabs on its seven closest neighbors and ignores all else.
As if the day had witnessed enough,
it began to fold in on itself,
clouds lowered with the sun
to a tint of evening—nothing more than a tint,
to where the roofline began to shadow
against the peel of whitening blue
and from my left, starlings
in a fluid veil of dark shadowing,
bulbous shifts synchronized
in the current of their flying—
liquid in their movement,
changing patterns and lines
like that of a woman lost to her emotions;
their wings a hurried tempo, a singing
out in waves of current, humming
shifts of rushing water caught in rocks
how they protest their going—
filmy dotted rounds unfurling to whims
of thinning ribbons, in serous whorls and roils,
an overhead chaos seeking its direction
and then, as if they tired of my watching
they were gone with nothing but the silhouetted
tree line to answer for their passing.
Behind the Storm
Originally published elsewhere
Even the wind tries
to warn the sea,
this is not for you
pushes back against
its sun-brushed tips
each wave becomes
an unnatural
arc of broken white spray,
falls to the next ebb,
pushes back against
the glassy whorl
of green as if to warn,
no, no this is not for you
and yet the shoreline
beckons, opens
itself to more.