Poems by Chris Bullard
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Balance
“Now there are so many eagles that there is a not a natural balance and they have this unlimited killing field....” The New York Times, June 9, 2021.
by Chris Bullard
From Canary Fall 2023
Chris lives in a large, brick-faced building in the center of Philadelphia. He copes by growing tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers, potatoes, and corn on a plot in a community garden on the bank of the Schuylkill River.
Too many
eagles
is a concept
that I don’t
understand
fully.
It’s like
saying too many
Americans.
Oh, I see.
© Chris Bullard
Process
by Chris Bullard
From Canary Fall 2023
Soil generates
forest
from the idea
of forest.
Seeds and rootstock
do not bear
the blueprints
of pasture,
but carry designs
programmed
into their being
for ascendancy.
After clearcutting
and wildfire,
trees reach
again sunward,
acting as they
were conceived to do,
interlocking
in a single green mind,
that never loses
the thought
of what it was
and what it must be.
© Chris Bullard
View
by Chris Bullard
From Canary Fall 2023
From my apartment window,
I catch the river as an emptiness
between the industrial assemblage
on the east bank and the brick
row houses on the west, a narrow
space as unremarkable as a crack
running through crumbling masonry.
But when the angle is right,
the sun’s incandescence strikes
that gray surface, transmuting
its bleakness into extraordinary light,
as the wandering of water ignites
into newfound, fiery eminence,
like a lost god restored to his throne.
© Chris Bullard