L.R. Harvey Poetry

Mountain Drives or “How to Read a Poem” “They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means.” Billy Collins A first-time drive around a poem’s slopes Will find your focus tuned to every turn. Your energy Will mostly be Engaged in staying on the road, In navigating all the twists of meaning, Determining direction in your reading, And tracking the author’s mind In hopes that you will find The poem’s themes he’s hidden in its turns. But while your eyes are plastered on the road You’ll fail to see the daisies on the hill; The mountain sight Upon your right Will come and go and you’ll never know. Surrounded by a beautiful world of words You’ll only watch the way the poem curls And coils. To stay alive You’ll focus on the drive And let the surrounding scene go by at will. But by your second outing, and more your third, Having learned the road on previous jaunts, You’ll be free to see The intricacies That make th...

An Eternity Moment on Walnut St. Bridge "To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty." - Ralph Waldo Emerson  The wooden river walkway sang A groaning song of thawing frost As we walked across. The boards were dark, Heavy with mist as we slowly ranged The river, hand in hand, lost Both in direction and in coy remarks. “It’s funny, the way our footsteps mark The withered wood with a lively crunch.” Your springtime eyes surveyed the bare And brittle trees banking the water, And as snowflakes nestled your hair, you launched Into a passionate spiel to share The ways that Winter reminded you Of death, or something of the sort – But I was lost, watching your eyes Light up in evening light, the blue Mist that accompanied your words, Your hair assuming a dappled guise; And in the midst of death I found my life.

A World of Flowering Misperceptions “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” – Henry David Thoreau The child who was told from birth that “flower” meant The daisies on the windowsill, and never was sent To pick the crimson rose in the park next-door, Perceives the vibrant roses as nothing more    Than folded discolored daisies, not flowers, he’s sure. When judged by lily criteria, sunflowers seem Too bright a flower with blinding sunny gleam When placed against the placid lily’s guise: Their light is dimmed when seen through lily eyes.     Because they’re not the lilies their beauty dies. The daisy’s frail when one expects a rose, The lily’s pale as far as sunflowers go – Experience often predetermines worth, And so we judge our neighbors on the earth.

Faces in the Crowd The musician who revels in the notes That float from his gnarled ash guitar,  Satisfied in the company  Of song, content to never know  The high of a crowd's adoring roar,  Has found the joy of mediocrity.  The writer, knowing his words have worth  Solely because they belong to him  And no one else, writing to tell  A story never told before,  Is unphased by publishers' fickle whims  And finds the garb of anonymity fits well.  And so with the athlete, whose body knows The joy of movement for movement's sake,  The artist, whose painted canvas brings More joy to him than fame could boast,  The cook, who'd rather blend and bake  To serve his passion instead of cook for kings.  To learn to thrive in normalcy, To excel in mediocrity!

A Discount Genie or: Writer's Block  I need a discount genie, please. Your cheapest one should do, I think, Given the fact I only need A single wish, not three. Yes sir, same day delivery, For I've finally come to the very brink Of losing it, so he really needs To come today.                          You see, He needn't exert much energy Or tax his powers, for I won't wish For health or love or joy or beauty Or anything so heavy. No, all that I'll ask is that he'll bring My pen the words that finally fit The thoughts I feel incessantly Pulsing to be set free.

Making Fossils Yesterday evening as the sun was setting and I was writing at my desk and getting around that point when all my writing was reading over the same two lines again and again, I strayed from my post to take a walk behind my house, breathing the evening wind to give my thoughts the silence to freely talk.   I found my muse (or maybe my muse found me) beside a stream beneath a dogwood tree: A weathered rock like an egg among the leaves that begged, as those rounded rocks are known to do, that I should pick it up and rub its back, and doing so I felt a leaf infused within the rock, a fossil that was left intact. I’d learned in middle school that fossils formed from leaves that dropped from trees and somehow squirmed their way between a couple of rocks, like worms that wriggle free from dirt to be flattened by a shoe.  It’s always portrayed to be a chance encounter, just like the worm and shoe or guy meets girl: another ...