Marc Wiegand’s work has appeared in Blue Unicorn, Ekstasis, The Galway Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Madrigal, and Penwood Review, among others.

He is an international lawyer, visual artist and writer who lives and works in the Texas Hill country. www.artmarco.net/works.

Martins

The air is soft where martins fly.
They stitch transparent threads of flight
into the quilt of afternoon
as the arc of the sun moves inch by inch
toward the slow approach of night.
 
Shadows under the soffits wait
where sheltered eaves make space for love:
the nest where martins have their young.
Daylight walks across the room.
Epiphanies of dusk appear.
 
Outside, their movement traces life
on a casement window filled with light
the falling sun has turned to glare.
Though, from within, it seems a glass      
that would frame the glowing atmosphere,
 
would hold the hills beyond the fence,
and a garden that cannot contain
the brevity of flight,
the disappearing day,
the immense darkness of the fallen night.

Write

If I never write a word, a line
like these, what else, what syllables,
in brief, would fill this shallow space, 
the memory of my wary RAM,
my disc, my sheet or leaf?
 
These crippled lines (their limping thought)
will drift until I “Save” to fix
their digital 1s and Os that hunt
your mind (with luck, your heart) with these
electrons that I wrote. 
 
You (voiceless reader), ear and crowd, 
my guest within this game. Though now
my tree, this rhetoric, felled, will fall
through sound to prove by hearing (yours)
a momentary fame that swells
a distant thunder from this text
more felt, I hope, than heard.
Your hearing and your sight become
our oath by this my naked word.

Gardening

I set these fallow words to seed and work
to till their silent tongues into the earth,
though working knows their good is frail,
as knowing knows the harvest has no worth,
unless the gardener’s seed takes root
in soil that blossoms into wealth.
 
I heard the summer say your ears are deaf
to poetry, as if I stood a mute. Who knows?
I’ll turn the earth with the tools at hand:
a prayer that thunderclouds bring rain,
a bow to fire the arrow of my art,
a wooden plow that furrows soil to make
a garden where the stones cry out
for pillow in your bedrock heart.