Caroline Misner

A Hard Climb

The frill of trees jig their lady skirts

about their knees, buckling

under the weight of the wind’s hard approach.

When we exhale, our breaths dangle,

rearranging syllables and accents

the Yanks still claim we carry.

The clouds recoil in pieces of time;

inch by inch they scud across the sky,

downy spools drawing in their lines.

The black hills ball against the blue,

splash their painted trees, golden

glowing corridors to wander through.

Dropped leaves assemble into cobblestones

of amber and scarlet upon the path,

carpeting the gnarled and bulging roots

like the blue swollen veins in an old man’s hand.

The boughs rattle when we near,

scramble brittle flakes about

like a shaken globe of snow.

Sequestered birds, plump from the summer’s binge,

weigh down the perch of each branch and twig.

It’s a hard climb up these knuckles of rock;

the stone and spine of earth create a natural stair;

moss and frosted lichen cushion our path

tramped by those who passed through here,

leaning on sticks cracked off the edge

of fallen logs. Other people scatter like ants

at our approach; everyone’s come to find a reflective solitude.

At the summit we finally see

the river we couldn’t find at first;

having lost our way we decided

to climb the escarpment instead.

Laundry laps in the wind,

dangling and dancing on its hinge;

each farm has a patched quilt plot;

the remnants from the last harvest,

the beans and pumpkins,

have already been left out

in the sun to rot.

Gaunt and troubled sunflowers

flank the gardens;

brown heavy heads droop

as though in prayer—

they already know they are dying.

Continue...

Greetings one and all and welcome to my brand new website! Please bear with me portrait

I work on filling its pages with news and musings. Being technologically challenged, it may take a while to work out some of the glitches and I hope to have it finished within the next few weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to browse through the archives and have a look at some of my work. I've been writing poetry ever since I could remember and I've decided to include a section of Juvenilia in the archives. Most of the poems listed there were written in my early teens and many of them are just plain awful! But a few gems do stand out and I hope you enjoy them. Also, if you would like to know more about me and the work I do, please feel free to click on "About". There I have posted a brief biography of myself. I'm not trying to be falsely modest, but I really loathe bragging about myself. I feel an author's work should stand on its own merits and where an author was born or where she lives or what she eats for breakfast are completely irrelevant.

I would also be remiss if I didn't included a big Thank You! to my oldest son, Kevin, who with a friend designed this website for me and programmed it so that even I could manage it. And another big Thank You! goes to my dear father Jan Kurz, who was in on it the whole time and provided the stunning photography behind the text of the daily poem. And another big Thank You! goes out to all the editors, publishers and fellow writers who have supported me and my work over the years and gave me a chance when I needed it, including a Journey Prize nomination and two Pushcart Prize nominations!

"...And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt."
--Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)