"CASTAWAY", "DUST", & "IRONCLAD" by Regine Ebner

CASTAWAY

skies

bristle to midnight

to sleep in the shadow of the barn

with homesick dreams

and pourquoi tales

lost among the furious trees

to settle for the shelter

of the velvet owl

to live in the land of

castaway lamps

and the bare moon rustle

of the windy barn

DUST

an uncommon day of light and air

a poet with swallowtail eyes

a lonely rabbit with bigger dreams

we clamor for boulders in the dry dust wind

a mooring, a strand

a shimmer in the roaming shade

but the lonely rabbit

with the dry dust eyes

will sleep by the brambled grave

IRONCLAD

a crackling train

night indigo

lurches along mudshack outposts

wrestling the cargo of the lonely blacksmith

the emptiness of the last trampled plain

time’s merciful silhouette

with nothing more to lose

burns its love letters in the coal fires

of a treeless dusk

and vanishes into the dusty threads

of history’s folktale

Regine is a teacher and writer in the American Southwest. Her work has been published in numerous magazines including Black Bough Poems, Consilience, Loft Books, Cerasus Magazine, Spellbinder and others. She writes about the great Sonoran Desert, love and loss.