Bob Schwartz

Sigh

Stop your sighing
You will scare away
The birds

Wisdom Is Where You Find It

Wisdom is here
Where you find it
Collect everything
Discard everything
Still everything remains
One thousand and one sages
Advise you
Then disappear
Leaving you with empty shelves
And the world

Night Bird Still Awake

Opening the window an inch
It is as if
That bird alone is
Bringing the night
Into the dark room
Or has the solo song
Taken me out?

Quilts

Those who sew
The finer clothes
Worn and admired
For life lifting
Form and function
Honored for their hard won skill
Using needle and precious cloth.
My works are barely fashioned
From scraps sitting on a dusty shelf
Stuffed in an almost forgotten box.
Crude quilts not meant to do much
Or mean much
But nagging to be made.

© Bob Schwartz 2017

Moonstruck

The sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
Psalms 121:6

What harm can the moon do
By striking you?
Is it madness
The derivative cool light
Of a white satellite
Instead of the blinding broiling
Yellow star
That menaces you?
He neither slumbers nor sleeps
And neither do you
When one leaves
One arrives
Closed lids do not shade it
Right hand or left.

© Bob Schwartz 2017

Distance Zero

Locate it where you might
Upper left of your brain
Around your heart
In your hands and feet
You won’t need GPS to find
The perpetual point
With a voice but no one name
Embodying it all
Willing to do nothing but remind you
Of the good things learned and to be learned
Keeping that other one at bay
Just by its presence and proximity
Which is right here now
At a distance of zero

© Bob Schwartz 2017