ROBIN NEAL
★ ★ ★ ★
POETRY
Image by Machi Kouyo
Beneath the Willow
Under its leaves
ants and spiders descend.
Strength braids into softness
with basket weaved branches
that tickle the grass.
Insistent sunrays tremor earth’s atoms
and the willow calms them with its shade.
I am a guest in this house of
flickering light and glinting webs.
My body, a vessel
for this moment.
Now basked and glowing
from this trip,
I close my book.
My palm turns to soil
and readies
for the earthworm feast.
Pelagic
To be of the sea
among Sargasso clouds of entrails,
a nursery of golden floating seaweed.
I am compass lead to its edge,
mothered and born of the sea.
Windless calms, unbound
New species wade in rich blue clarity
Inland, I taste your outland.
salty current surrounded.
The earth’s center pulls
with churning molten iron and nickel,
magnetoreception connect / my iron finds your iron
direction in sea scrolls.
Morning sails billow.
Scales manifest and fins form.
Eels my brethren,
linked by home drift.
Dearly beloved,
we are gathered here to witness
this entanglement of eternity.
can we return?
Concave and beleaguered,
eyes gouged out,
reverse subliming:
pearl to oyster.
Robin Neal is a graduate student at the MFA creative writing program at Lindenwood University and has been published in The Raven’s Perch. She resides in Spring Hill, TN as a mother, wife, woman, creative dreamer, and writer. Previously she has worked for 15 years as a nutritional scientist and this influences her work today.
3 Comments
Submit a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Beautiful poetry Robin, deeply moving. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you so much!
So proud of you….you are an inspiration.
And I love how your bio includes your role as a “woman”
xoxo