This blog's namesake

 There’s a reason I titled this blog Thoughtmoot, and it’s because the Ents in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings are the coolest, most epic fantastical creatures ever imagined.

This set of five haikus is a tribute to their awesomeness.

 

Awakening

Fangorn lies dormant,

shrouded by dusk. Trees murmur,

lamenting lost love.

 

Two halflings, blindly

grasping among shadows thick

and gnarled, twisting roots

 

Inadvertently

steal shepherds from a heavy

and mournful slumber.

 

Stiff and weary have

branches turned as ages passed.

Once-green beards now gray,

 

Resigned. Yet ancient

wind stirs rough, knobbled hearts, and

the Ents march to war.

For my dad

 My dad is awesome. First off, he’s generous-with his time, his money, and his heart. He’s constantly putting me to shame-and inspiring me-by being the most persistently considerate and thoughtful person I know. My dad is everything a man should be-supportive, and faithful, and strong. He’s a dreamer and a realist and he’s patient when it counts.

Sure, he’s got his flaws, but I have never met someone as wholeheartedly good as my dad.(That’s why he’s the best.)

 

Desert Rose

Years ago, my father

procured a jewel imported from a distant land-

one of dunes and crawling shrubs.

He anticipated its arrival with restless hands

and a gleam in his eye.

 

When it came, packaged neatly into a box on a truck,

he placed it gingerly among the other residents

of a table-top oasis he’d created (without really meaning to).

There it basked in sunlight it hadn’t seen for weeks,

incomplete limbs stretching upward, like a lopsided crown

gilded by only a few sparse leaves.

To my father it was a treasure,

though it would seem to anyone else

unremarkable.

 

Until this summer,

years later,

the desert rose sensed its incubation was complete

and emerged bright and early one Sunday morning

to present its humble beauty to the sky-

just as my father always knew it would

someday.

The earth's gravitational pull

For some people, it’s the shower. For others, their favorite fallen log in the woods by their house, or their desk next to the third-floor picture window.

For me, for whatever reason, inspiration always hits me like a head-on collision while I’m driving. My car-whose name is Sunny-is like a magical vehicle of metaphysical contemplation. Kind of like the time machine in Back to the Future (only without the inadvertent creation/disruption of alternate timelines… I think).

 

What Doc Brown Meant

I trundle along on gravity-encumbered wheels

tracing yellow on one side,

green on the other.

But miles away,

there’s a place where this road meets

a hole in the clouds made by energy

and poetry

and its jagged edge swallows the road

letting the stars in

and the fireflies out.

 

If I drive far enough

the yellow and green will fade from my rear-view mirror

and the earth’s leaden core will soften its grip

so these wheels will lift off

and tread on air

and the streetlights will blink goodbye,

tracing the edges of a song.

Far-away friends

 I’ve never seen the Northern Lights.

At least, not anywhere outside of my own mind. But I’ve always been fascinated by them. There’s something so ethereal, so magical about the way they move across the darkened sky-something that can only be hinted at in photographs and never fully understood. This poem, written late last summer, is the closest I have ever gotten to witnessing that magic first-hand.

I hold this poem close to my heart, because it reminds me of the friend who inspired it, and because I’m weirdly in love with the cosmos.

Everything about it is so far out of my reach, so vastly beyond my comprehension. But I look at the stars in all their unattainability, and it somehow brings me closer to a God whose reach will never be too short to find me where I am, even in all of the world’s chaos.

Maybe distance is what makes love stronger.

 

 

An Apostasy of Light

“Nothing gold can stay.” ~Robert Frost

The sky did something out of character last night.

Prompted-

according to the weather on Channel 7-

by a solar flare,

which, in short,

has something to do with solar wind

and its interaction with our atmosphere

and which caused the Northern Lights

to dance their way down from the tundra

and make an appearance over our acres and acres

of rolling cornfields.

We took our places below the wide dome of night,

far away from interfering streetlights

whose bright, indifferent haze

would have prevented us from witnessing the

miracle of blue-green light

stretching out over the horizon

as though connecting our world to the one above.

Cameras forgotten on seats in the car,

we stared, transfixed,

as the light crept slowly upward,

melting further across the star-lit ceiling

until its cue for the grand finale-

For one infinitesimal, eternal moment

a blaze of gold pulsed against itself,

then, giving in to the pull of gravity,

faded out of sight and into memory.