Joseph Stroud Poems

Take a plane to London.
From King's Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of the Nidd,
...

Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down,
a world becoming white, no more sounds,
no longer possible to find the heart of the day,
the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all
...

Bitter the warmth of sunlight, and bitter the taste of apple,
the song and the stars and wheat fields, bitter the memory,
moonlight, the shine of the lake's surface in morning
...

I, too, remember the past, my room lit by candles,
and the night she entered and touched my face
with her face, with mouth and tongue and lips,
...

From a pyre on the burning ghat
a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.
As if remembering something important.
...

The yellow jacket keeps crashing against the pane
trying to get out. All along it's only a matter
of opening the window, finding the words,
...

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light's great
...