This collection of 100 poems by Don Hynes resonate with the rhythms of crashing waves and towering forests from the heart of the Pacific Northwest. Hynes explores the rugged beauty of trees, rocks, and rolling waves through an intimately personal lens.
More than nature poetry, these are soul poems – borne of memory, heartache, and dream visions. They reach transcendentally across time and space to connect with the reader’s own experiences of change and self-discovery.
Poems that reach into lifetimes – past, present and those to be imagined, and in the tradition of America’s most enlightened poets such as Mary Oliver and William Stafford, speak in a quiet voice of your place on earth and the place you are preparing.
As the world sleeps, night rivers flow steeped in silence. Ravenous for knowledge I devour the quiet hours, then kneel, an acolyte, in dawn’s gray light, bearing gifts of darkness. Reading of
Fall winds stripped the trees, their summer finery burned in wet heaps. The sun, far south, burns orange in the roar of roaming garbage trucks. I gather myself with no sight of the sea, no scent of tide, watching the town wake like a rooftop crow, at peace above the
Old age drove the arrogance out, humbled me with aching joints, muscles that no longer work. I get by – climb a hill, carry bundles, cans of gas, whatever the island demands, but put me in a chair for more than an hour and I’m bent like an aged farmer.
