Heron: you’re so still

you become part of the hill

and make my eyes fill

Yellow and Blue and Gold

You fall asleep thinking about color:

how yellow and blue made enough

greens to transport you to a long-

gone moment on Ireland’s west coast.

Later, you remember stroking yellow

gouache on fine paper, slowly feeling

you’d become yellow, you were yellow,

yellow and you would forever be one.

Then, that twilight moment you stepped

outside the yurt to see the black trees

against pale sky, and witnessed darkness

spread itself in a brushstroke of blue paint.

Now back to the childhood day at the piano--

when you stopped practicing scales to make

your own melody just as late sun swam

through a window, turning dust motes to gold.

ML McNeal

Everything Is Wrong, Yet

Nothing stops the nasturtiums:

red-orange, bold as flame,

every green leaf offering

its hair-thin pale starburst,

each bloom’s center as fragile

and mysterious as any future.

We stare down empty streets

in silence, trying to imagine how

and if we’ll survive our failures.

Yet: honeybees appear today

as if they’d never left. Here.

Now. On bursts of nasturtium.

ML McNeal

April, 2020