Sample Poems by G.H. Mosson

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First Steps


Can I throw a bottle
at the sky
to catch a heart?

Clouds cruise past
my grasping
in windcast shapes.

I’ve traveled beyond
the petri-dish of school
to start

with hand-me-down
maps
in the land of adults.

Not yet versed,
with just templates
and textbooks,

can I speak through
this soundproof solitude?
Will I stumble

like apples drop
into someone’s
half-moon lap?

When glancing
our way,
the Greek gods,

how they chased
us all
into changing shapes.

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Leaving the Black Hills

for Jeny

Worn obelisks of black granite
bake beneath barely touching, thin pines
like jaw-bones of fossilized gods
among cows, deer, buffalo, us.

Your father’s idle farmstead where we summer
nestled in a South Dakota valley that rims to cliffs
now purrs to the washing machine’s churn
of our rain-drenched clothes.

Its knocking drowns out the storm.
The wind-trembled world slashes
behind walls, as we cup coffee,
you put on jazz.

Penumbras in the pine cover . . .
your voice . . .
the safety of wood beams . . .
how after all this my life roared. . . .

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Domination of Tulips in Washington D.C.


Tulips unclasp their several doors
of petals that spade into giving cool rain
as pistils arise through sunspots under trees.

Mobius-shaped breezes crisscross the National Mall
as storm clouds torn from last night disperse
on this seasonal seam between winter and spring.

Pink tulips, with inner parabolas of white stars,
sprout in rows on municipal plots, pop up
in Rock Creek Park at the birthing spots of deer.

Petal-nests all around cup water, which quivers
to the pongs of stray raindrops, soft rumble of cars.
Noticing, I bend to thumb the pelt
of a purple tulip,  nudge myself open.

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Tidal Song


Hot tans have sighed to cooler brown
before the ocean darkens, before brawny waves pound
shells into filaments. The sound, as if
war in the distance, is the day
circling into itself.

A jellyfish shoots up the beach until pulled
back against wet sand, curves into a ridge,
embeds the jellyfish. The tide’s white curlicues
always stop short. Night arises
over the exposed and stranded.

First, they will shiver into shock, suck
water out of sand, then dry out,
deflating to see-through
discs, before at dawn,
stinging red cores glint.

There are hundreds of red and silver dashes
caught in the windows of the waves.
Soon the tide will abandon them
to rot until, piece by piece, it tows
them back for the moiling fish.

Maybe the jellyfish also sensed—as the tide
kept washing it up, pulling
it back—maybe we are all estranged
in this: unwilling
to die, unwilling to yield.