Three New Poems
Poems for the human condition...
Dear Reader,
These three poems move along the same fault line, though they look in different directions while doing so. They are concerned with scale—what it feels like to live inside a body that is small, temporary, and yearning, set against forces that are ancient, biological, and largely indifferent.
Turtle Island begins beneath our feet. It asks us to notice how little ground there really is to stand on. The city, the planet, the universe itself are all in motion, whether we acknowledge it or not. Our lives play out atop vast, slow systems we can neither stop nor fully comprehend.
Instructions in Love turns from geology to biology. Here, love is not idealized; it’s observed. Care and cruelty exist side by side, not as moral opposites but as recurring facts of life. The poem resists tidy definitions and easy hope. And yet, it leaves a narrow opening—an exhausted mother holding her newborn—where something like grace might appear, unearned and fleeting.
The Myth of Icarus brings the scale back to the self. It’s a reckoning with time, ambition, and the strange grief of having once felt limitless. This is not the story of a fall so much as the story of weight. Of gravity becoming perceptible, youth receding into memory, of still looking toward the sun even after learning what it costs.
Taken together, these poems don’t offer answers so much as attention. They ask what it means to live knowingly: on a moving world, inside fragile bodies, with desires that often exceed what we can sustain. If there’s any instruction here, it’s not a directive but an invitation to stand still for a moment, feel the ground shift, and keep looking anyway.
Enjoy!
-RD
TURTLE ISLAND Riding on the back of some great turtle Manhattan moving underfoot the earth on its axis plates inching along like worms on dry concrete, barely move an inch and here we are running ‘long the great surface of the world like ants over hills the universe expanding and no place to put your feet. 𑁍𑁍𑁍 INSTRUCTIONS IN LOVE Forget what I said no one knows the meaning of love. Just last week saw a bird leave its nest, screaming chicks begging after mother, watching her fade into the distance. A black splotch against the sun. Then, Tuesday, saw a stray beat its pups, maw all foamy white, barking incoherence, shivering in the cold. Cruelty: the great constant across species our moments of affection what biology allows or a miracle breaking through— a mother, body spent, holding her new born child. 𑁍𑁍𑁍 THE MYTH OF ICARUS I’ve been old for longer than I’ve been young. No one to blame but me. You get so used to growing pains, you never quite feel your age. One day your wide-eyed, the next your weary. Like old growth pine or deep mountain roots, you feel it in your base, weak in the knees. Suddenly, you feel the weight of gravity, the earth caving in, and desperate for a ledge, you hang on to your youth. All those times you used to fly, forgotten in a haze of could’ve been futures— were cursed to walk the earth with eyes for the sun.