I like ‘em both for the same reason: they involve writing words worth a thousand pictures. Here’s my entry for the LPSNJ National HS Poetry Competition Dec ‘09:
Everlasting
Canopy, coolness. Green-diffracted light-not-light ether-rays from Sun that doesn’t burn the
Heat-peat of the living, mottled-matte ground-mat
Of autumn’s fallen blades
Which sink with the wood and are consumed into the trees, into the mist. Into dust-chariots
On which great fog streams of God-thought-breath ride until bursting-emerging
In enlightenment through the leaves…
And the alien Power Lines stood tall in fire-barren field on the scrub hill,
Surveying the scorched skeletons of ancient stumps.
Yet they wept in anger,
At the fresh buds they had wrought
Even as in wrath with flame they smote the mountain,
At the life that yet persisted betwixt charred exterior and undying core,
At Nature, immortal as they were impermanent.
Which cycles surely as the moon that daily rises upon the woods,
Which cannot be long defied by infernal lightning nor the man-made destruction
With which we ourselves smite,
In foolish attempt to score a lasting mark
Into the quicksand on which we rest,
That broadens as we hack away the roots beneath.