Sample Poems by Faye George

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The While We Live

The while we live, the little while,
days that wander west
with the vast indifference of gods
to the patterns we make
in the spinning blizzard of stars.

Ridiculous, the stumbling throng of us,
whose peculiar grace is
this conceit of love, whim of a brain
hankering after a bigger piece of being,
a mote troubling the mind of notime
which blew it forth.

What is it about this earth,
this crucible,
that pulls down angels
and gives birth to hope
the while we live, the little while?

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Artifact

There where it lay
as the days flowed over it,
sunk in the life of a stone again.

A stone, professing its purpose
to none but the ignorant soil
and the merciful grass, yet

forever changed, whatever its use,
by the thumbed creature
of purpose,

who found and fondled
the dark gray basalt, worked
and turned it to a suitable shape.

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Tool

When the hand had learned
that the brain understood

the dialect of finger and thumb,
then work might begin

on the dull stone
where the eye saw

what the body would need
to begin the long climb.

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Fox Creek

From my day of inventorying the field work
of the hunters and gatherers of stone tools

from a lost time that left no name of its own --
saying that Dalton, Kirk, Brewerton and like

tell only what the tongues of our own time
happen upon -- it was in passing

between the descendants of trees
that gave branch and limb to the hafting

of those wrought stones, the flaked and notched
flint, chert, quartz that accomplished

the ancient stalkers' work, that I saw
the wild figure of the fox like a hunted thing,

fur-fletched tail straight as an arrow,
dash from cover to green cover across the road

where I passed in the leaf light of late afternoon
through which the stream ran.