Impulse to Action

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Portrait of a Shipwrecked Invader

Shades of green with pops of white

A tightly wrapped bud with a blush of pink

A pure white whorl of petals glows in the morning light

A star of sepals surrounds a wiry ring of spent stamen around the ovary incubating seeds.

Survivor of salt spray and freezing winters

Impassable thickets of rugosa spread from underground runners

- Armoring spikes protect tender shoots and a stockade of stalks

Hips dense with seeds nourish animals who further spread the robustly prolific plant.

A schooner filled with horticultural oddities floundered and its cargo fell into the ocean

Scrawny and scraggly, the specimens broke free of their crates and settled in the sand, sent out scouts, secured a beachhead, largely unnoticed

Rooted deeply in the land, gone native, crossbreed, flourished

A new participant shifted the ecology.

-- Larry Wolf, 26 June/7 July 2025

[Index of Poems]

Larry Wolf, Thorny Beauty (2025)

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Sonya at Sixteen

Surrounded - Heshel, Miriam, Ruthie, Harold, Abe -

no Anita

headaches, dizzy, bewildered, dead

just before Pesach

we moved on

like always

running

running from

Europe

North Atlantic

vast Canada

Brooklyn

enough already

Observant, keeping the old ways, though papa keeps his yarmulke under his hat

Ruthie and I navigate - Yiddish, Russian, English - their guides in this new world

I’m ready to break out and find my way

observant of me

still I see Benji

he helped me pick out this coat

stylish

mama says I’m too ready to leave

I should take my time

Time!

Anita was so vibrant - now gone

shvester I miss you

We are gathered before the camera

smile but don’t smile

relax but not too much

show the people in Kyiv we’ve arrived

we have warm coats

shined shoes (well, not papa)

a professional photographer

Ruthie is ready to dance

I just want this to be over.

-- Larry Wolf, 24 June 2025

[Index of Poems]

Unknown Photographer,
My Great Grandparents and their Children (1917?)

Written at Richard Blanco's The Photographic Poem at Maine Media Workshops and College

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Me and Coffee

Larry Wolf, Micro Espresso Montreal (2025)

Three times during our visit to Montreal to sip espresso at the counter, to buy some dark roast Brazilian beans to bring home. Savoring that coffee now.

Micro Espresso

Yesterday they were fire bombed. I'm devastated even at this distance. Humans sowing chaos. And rebuilding. Otherwise moving on. Us and all our addictions, all our love. Alive in our memories, living as phoenix, death and birth in flames.