We do not identify flowers
We do not identify flowers
By color
Or the architecture of their blossoms
Or the medicinal properties
Of their roots and leaves and petals
But by the tiny songs they sing
When the wolves are out at night.
This poem is from the book A Friendly Little Tavern Somewhere Near the Pleiades by Buff Whitman-Bradley (Finishing Line Press) and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a-friendly-little-tavern-somewhere-near-the-pleiades-by-buff-whitman-bradley/
In this new volume, A friendly little tavern somewhere near the Pleiades, the poet continues making us laugh and sigh, and sometimes gasp in astonishment, with his melancholy, ecstatic, imaginative, philosophical, and utterly charming poems about #life, #age (old and young), #nature, the theological debates of ants, the nectar-besotted revelries of bees, whimsically imagined after-lives, and the #poet’s own glee at his little grandaughter’s assessment of him: “He’s a good guy/but he’s really slow.”
Buff Whitman-Bradley is a poet of life’s little moments, of nature, and in earlier volumes, of political poems that rage with compassion. One of his previous collections, At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Mortality, is a book of swan songs, but songs from a swan that isn’t much interested in pathos, whining, or tragedy. This swan shrugs its extravagant wings at mortality and sings its songs with grace, wit, economy, a perfect ear, and understated profundity.
The Paddock Review 