I mined my journal, chock full of my relationship with nature, in nature. I wanted to distill the quality and the relationship lyrically, with a song – a sonnet – lyric and inviting, to capture an ongoing leitmotif of the recurring experience, in dream and by streams, of feeling a part of the natural world. I’d like to be a stream, a rock in a stream, the ongoing and the static of existence.
After gleaning phrases from my journal and responding to the photo, the sonnet began to form. I have since worked with rhythm and meter to capture more of a classic sonnet, without a set a rhyme scheme.
Spring Dreams
I am the dawn child of clear mountain streams
one with the smooth sheen of rocks and pebbles,
rings of waves eddy around curved boulders,
a kaleidoscopic light in snow fed
shallow flowing water, no color but
what is borrowed from the sky. New green leaves
create a mottled shade, sanctuary
for rainbow trout. I will not drown, spread out,
span the width from dirt bank to cool elbow
of sand for my bare toes on a hot day.
Can I be both, river and child, my heart
alive under growing clouds, threat of rain?
I hear the Rio Santa Barbara call,
years flow past, water cold on my bare calves.
Michelle Holland lives in Chimayó, New Mexico. Her poetry publications include “Event Horizon,” The Sound a Raven Makes, New Mexico Book Award for Poetry, Tres Chicas Press, and Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press. Her books Circe at the Laundromat is forthcoming from Casa Urraca Press. Michelle is treasurer of New Mexico Literary Arts, and poet-in-residence at the Santa Fe Girls School.
Holland-Dozier-Holland
From your seat in a leather desk chair, you gaze out the window in your writing room. The wind chimes you bought when you moved into this house have lost the clapper during the past winter, and the black enamel has eroded, leaving the silver tubes exposed to the havoc of blizzards and storms. You have not heard the instrument’s melodies since your last German shepherd passed. In mid afternoon a finch alights on the aging deck to perch on a post beside the chimes in order to survey the sky for red-tailed hawks and the terrain for cats before flying into a viburnum. After this year’s finch flutters away, you continue to read from Moby Dick and an anthology of movie poems. Films you would call them, if you were a cineast. For weeks, you’ve wondered if the white whale has been retired from the literary canon as you drew near to the end of the book without any of the ambushes you would expect from Jaws or the squid attacks in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. On your porch the finch skips back into the sunlight, and you notice its feathers shedding February browns in favor of the radiance from an April sunbeam. The bird chirps a song you can hear through closed storm windows. Just such a finch has visited your springs throughout the lives of all the German shepherds you have companioned. Perhaps the absence of the Leviathan in your adventures turns you toward an enigma that might be kindness. Toward a silent conundrum that might even be joy.
Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, won a 
Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volumes of poetry, A Slipknot to Somewhere Else (2018) and How Do We Create Love? (2019), were recently released (Cholla Needles Press). He has a Sunday poetry column in 
The Zingara Project 