Poems by Leslie Hodge
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The Woods at Twilight
by Leslie Hodge
From Canary Spring 2024
Leslie lives near the Torrey Pines State Natural Preserve. It features wind-swept sandstone formations, and its Pacific beaches are favored by surfers, body-boarders, dolphins, leopard sharks, and migrating whales.
If age is a notch slashed into a tree on a path
through overgrown forest, then death is the cliff at trail’s end.
Grieving’s a cloudburst hammering granite, and solace
the wavering rainbow. Memories, mouse skulls coughed up
by owls. The snake writes your name in the dust, sheds
his skin of bright promise. We are learning to read
the signs on the trail, feeling our way as the light fails.
Previously published in The Main Street Rag.
© Leslie Hodge