SageGreenJournal.org

voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary

Roy Beckemeyer began his poetry career writinglove poems to his high school sweetheart. They have now been married for 55 years. More recently, his poems have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, 

Kansas City Voices, The North Dakota Review, Dappled Things, and I-70 Review,and various anthologies. Two of his poems were nominated for the 2016 Pushcart Prize competition. His collection of poetry, "Music I Once Could Dance To," published in 2014 by Coal City Review and Press, was selected as a2015 Kansas Notable Book by the State Library of Kansas and the Kansas Center for the Book.

Near midnight, the Milky Way crescendos.

Its tsunami of stars flings

light across the sky

until the glow becomes so bright

I can read the dreams

traversing your hushed face.

What unified theory accounts

for this patterning, this soft

radiance, the billions of light years,

the tens of thousands of stars

and galaxies that caress the curves

and symmetries of your sleeping face

with these ancient, countless, distant fires?

To the west, peaks sharp

as glass shards cut into the galaxy

of pinpricks, shear the blanket

of light so that it falls, shimmering,

into the water-filled cirque below us,

while, to the east, the front range diminishes

to a flatness that bounds the far end

of the sky with blackness.

I look back at your face just

as a smile floats there, briefly -

the light billowing, billowing,

blanketing us both in the

luminous spindrift, the gleaming

clarity of this universe,

expanding.

from Music I Once Could Dance To, 

Coal City Review Press, 2014