‘A Summer Hour’ and Other Poems by Sally Cook

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A Summer Hour

A burgeoning bush, some butterflies,
Low wooden steps, warped, faded, rise
Amid the calm of idle talk—
The blur of shadows on the walk.
Sometimes a passing, random thought
Within winged fantasy is caught,
While puffed clouds in a bowl of blue
Lie quiet in the overview.
Inconsequential bits of light
Form auras there, against the night.

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The White Moth Hunter

Above, in frigid air, a white moth there
Circles about, a crystalline white flake,
To find you, living by a frozen lake.
Drawn out by winter sun white moths freeze stiff—
You marvel from your perch. But I say if
In real life you should happen on that moth
In human form, so sensitive that both
Of you could trace the sky, your ties below
Would make you feel the creature had to go;
This thing too beautiful to live. A rout
Might clear your conscience, drive the memories out
And bring a sort of peace. In any case,
You’d cancel out its space, and so erase.

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The Light Is From Mozart

Curtains hang like light,
Semi-sheer and fine;
Diffusing sharper sight
As light pours down like wine.

Peaches in a bowl
Glister, rounded there;
Each circumference whole
In the placid air.

Improvisations, faint
Sparkling of Mozart
Resound, transpose in paint
An image of his heart.

previously publish in Expansive Poetry Online

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Sally Cook is both a poet and a painter of magical realism. Her poems have also appeared in Blue Unicorn, First Things, Chronicles, The Formalist Portal, Light Quarterly, National Review, Pennsylvania Review, TRINACRIA, and other electronic and print journals. A six-time nominee for a Pushcart award, in 2007 Cook was featured poet in The Raintown Review. She has received several awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, and her Best American Poetry Challenge-winning poem “As the Underworld Turns” was published in Pool.