BZ Niditch- Three Poems

PASSING BY

We are pilgrims passing

to another season

this October

with fresh sunflowers

in our garden hands

hoping day dreams

will survive

all barbed wire

of poisoned jealousy

beyond villages

of freezing grey

as in a Hardy novel

we watch departing feathers

counted on flying wings

on tall grass ravines

and murmuring shadows

Heaven knows each story

from these tall branches

as a mourning dove sings

by a sailor lost at Dover

at the light of a tumid river

and now at peace

we're trying to make amends

after a tourist jaunt

though the coppery rain

falls on six sea-buckthorn

it quickly covers us over

with clay sky memories

of a new Autumn

leaves us by cool rocks

under a shadowy orchard

wanting new friends.

THE JAZZ POET

Line by line up

crowds are in the shadow

in the hull

of my new translations

feeling their body of joy

as the music sounds

from landscaped heirs

off islands of the sea

where adventurer tourists

on a large ocean liner

hear me in an opulent time
playing smooth sax

in the cool night air 

risking my new riffs

by once frozen lips 

on slowly rowing 

words of memory

no longer poisoned

by motionless lovers

nor abandoned by absence

on those warring times

of fiery alarming devotions

under cold sleepy covers

now my good gestures move

as red and orange leaves us

with voices embracing Fall

when everything is new

in voices of water and wings.

BY THE GAZEBO

Needing a Jamesian moment

in London, Manhattan or Paris

when you are always here

over five stories to tell

love from a mismatch

from an old understanding

to catch an abandoned train

of a master's thought

if only for art's forsaking us

do we speak in luminous tones

an all clear signal

by the deserted winds

to signal our need for flowers

or tendrils of the earth

by all of us land exiles

as the waves run deeply

that we tremble at this hour

when the air turns cool

by the ocean front gazebo

now alone on the sandy beach

near the rocks and stone

of this home harbor

to hear sea voiced echoes

or share my art prints

as solitary bird draws us

emerging from the dunes

he too was searching for

the living waters and bread

as my riff

broke into a Bach solo

easily repaired by my verse

open in the full mouths

of angels yearning for

another Blakean soul 

in a passport of memories

pausing at a glowing shore

of fiery salamanders.