Bill Wunder

Hurricane Season

The clenched fists of waves
hammer a reeling shore.
Squall lines pinwheel
from this great howling ache,
a category six unnamed storm.
What could you call it?
What name would soften,
and personalize such pain as this?
It’s July, only the start
of hurricane season back home,
yet already I’m flotsam,
battered, and blown out
as if to an unrelenting,
slate gray Atlantic.
And I cannot recall
a hurt this vast,
this cold, this deep.

Moons

There are many of them—
the one I see tonight—
no solace
that I’m turning sixty,
the one that silvers the corn,
the one indifferent
about my cancer,
the luminous one
that guided me home
from rice paddies
and the one that mesmerized
the world in 1969.
I was twenty then,
awaiting orders when
Apollo orbited the dark side.

I know the old man’s expression
will pull the tide no matter
how many more harvests I’ll see.
But the allure faded
after that first powdered step—
Armstrong bounded
across his own white field of dreams,
planted the flag as if
we owned the cosmos
when we didn’t deserve the earth.

Bill Wunder is the author of Pointing at the Moon (WordTech Editions, 2008) and a chapbook, A Season of Storms (Via Dolorosa Press, 2002.) In 2004, he was named Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His poems have been widely published, and he has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry. Bill has been a finalist numerous times in The T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. In 2010, he was nominated for a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He has read and lectured in local schools, colleges, festivals, book stores, libraries, and on public television. Bill serves as Poetry Editor of The Schuylkill Valley Journal.