The Girl's Guava Tree

- and the good earth sustains
With thanks to the El Rural Centro Metodista.
Mirador, Costa Rica
March 10, 2010; revised March 30, 2015

Beyond the gravel-pocked streets
lined with cinder-block shops

and child-packed homes
capped with corrugated tin

christened in the sweat of strangers
called from a far land

past the worn-out weed field
trampled by children to dusty flat

where rough tracks fork left
below fenced hills of cane and cattle

down, down the rutted path
to the rushing boulder stream

where a nimble girl parts barbed wire
and clambers up the guava tree

through distant light she smiles
and shares


Other poems from Costa Rica:

• Jessica's Blessing
• The Night Music of San Rafael de Guatuso 
• A Friday Morning Devotional in Iglesia Evangelica Metodista

Fractal Shadows

Athens, Georgia
March 2, 2015; revised February 2, 2016

Like the jagged spine of the Karakoram
as seen from the heights of Harmukh,
to folds within folds on the face of K2,
indented with valleys of shadow and snow,

creased with ravines and ribbons of ice,
heaped with scree and hills of rubble,
with rills and pores reprising peaks
in the span of the Karakoram.

Like the shoreline of Ireland
from Mizen to Malin, sculpture
of oceans and rain, which whittled
the hills and chiseled the headlands

and carved out Donegal Bay
where inlets and coves
of Killybegs Harbor reprise
the whole shoreline of Éire.

Like profiles of mountains
and coastlines of islands, the glories
of nature and goodness of God -
our souls project a fractal shadow.

So render your day in a tiny diary,
a year in an honest Christmas letter.
Confess your career in a resume.
Draft your own obituary.

We span these scales with a singular flair -
from whispered prayer to epitaph
across the realm, recurrence maps.
The sum of our lives is a fractal affair.

The Julia Set, a fractal