D M Gordon

@dmgordon.com

380 Followers 344 Following

💔 🇺🇸 Holding tight to justice, equity, wonder & kindness. Dogged by dogs. Author of Loosestrife for Porcupines. www.dmgordon.com The goldfish aswim in my kitchen says O, O, O when it sees me, god of clean water, sprinkling dried insects from heaven.

a white and brown llama standing on a road, dark green forest behind.
A photo of several ceramic platters displayed, a blue and white oval with three white chickens. A larger beige oval with three fat white chicks. Bits of other dishes visible.
Four Native Americans looking puzzled and their medicine man, reading a book titled 101 Rain Dances. Egg beaters, not rain drops, are falling from the sky. "Oh! FOUR steps to the left and THEN three to the right!... What kind of dance was I doing?"
A black background, a creature that barely seems real, but is, a tiny sea slug that is round and looks like a green sheep with floppy purple ears and crossed eyes, on a bed of moss.
"I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, "literature" is: words that provoke response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is but an option." Simon Haisell quoting Alan Garner.
a pretty snake that looks like braided silk rope, llifting its head on blue stone, a few random leaves, dandelion for one.
A turtle on green grass in the hole she dug, brown earth churned up behind her. She has a particularly beautify eye. A young mother, I think.
A box of black buttons with "Enough" printed in white letters.
A flyer with event info.
Forest in the background. to the left, a large stone with smaller white stones making a heart. Ferns. Dead leaves. Cooper the dog, sitting with a dog-smile on his face.
A triangular window at three a.m. The full moon through the leavy branch of an oak, radiating its light.
a short scanning video of green trees, still water, a submerged stone retaining wall and channel opening and a flash of Cooper, a big dog, stepping into the scene.
A ceramic walrus surrounded by and partly obscured by ferns.
The wooden wall of a house and edge of a screen porch. Three chive flowers growing out of a crack between the baseboard and a stone.
A postcard on a striped cotton blanket, handwritten from a book reviewer. "Hi Diana! I enjoyed reading your book! Can't say I know what it all means—the book of life? But I am not frenzied. Seriously, I'm looking forward to getting my thoughts on paper. Thanks again, Charles. MOSSES AND IVIES Write to me in your unpracticed hand. Do not text. A postcard with a stamp. Write until you run out of room— up the sides in smaller and smaller letters, dear little e’s, outrageous y’s and confusing s’s; send a photograph of the cathedral, the stonework of generations— masons, oxen, horses—and say how you got there, where once the rich brought chairs to worship while everyone else stood, and now the forest grows, blackthorn in the sacristy, mosses and ivies, a goodly (godly?) stream murmuring over the flooring stones, all that green, as if that were always the plan, of the forest I mean. Tell me you aren’t lost, that your brain isn’t frenzied, that it’s real, that you haven’t heard the latest, that in the roofless nave you understand, finally, what it all means, for I do not. Write to me.
A magnolia tree in full flower, just at the moment of the blossoms loosening, the ground covered in petals, a blue, blue spring sky.
Green green grass, little white dog, centered, standing, looking beyond a wire fence in the late afternoon, outlined by light, wearing a green cotton tee-shirt.
A bookshelf in a bookshop, Loosestrife for Porcupines by D M Gordon front in center, porcupine in the foreground on the cover, a field at night, a full moon, NIghtly at the Institute of the Possible next to it, blue book, light blue title on the spine, next to The Best American Poetry
tiny blue four-petalled wildflowers with a yellow and white center, and a mouse nose peeking into the picture in the bottom corner.
A poem in three stanzas THE SECOND COMING— William Butler Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
a blue book on a breakfast tray with a blanket scrunched beside it. Title of the book: Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai.
A line drawing, white background. Two armless figures with knobby knees, round feet, broad shoulders... and antennae?
Flower in a clay pot with white and pink fluffy flowers; out the window a green field, trees, reddish baby spider maple tree-flowers and a blue-blue sky.
Two clay oval platters, one standing up on a display block with three white chickens on a blue and white background. One laying flat in the foreground with three fanciful round birds, tan background
Line drawing of a porcupine walking.
Line drawing of John Martinue, the parrot, on a bureau top.
A yellow forsythia bush in full yellow flower, a low gray sky, trees still bare, grass just starting to green.
Book Cover. Title Loosestrife for Porcupines. D M Gordon. Dark painting of a field at midnight ringed by trees. Full moon. Porcupine in the foreground, quills glinting with moonlight.
A tabletop set with goodies in a Barnes and Nobel store. A sign about Leaf Sheep, a new Substack with poems about animals. A sign for Loosestrife for Porcupines, my new book. A wooden bowl with chocolates. A stuffed sloth. A sign that says FREE POEMS, poems and a clutter of free poems and the book in front of all.
A vivid blue sky. Tiny red tree flowers.
Little speckled brown frog on a brown floorboard by a dark brown wall.
A drugstore Easter basket on a gray Corian kitchen counter, filled with candies, a chocolate rabbit, three little trinkets, a bottle of pink bubbles on the side, and some yellow calla lilies. Easter. Once upon a time, long time ago, I was a city girl. I moved to the country and bought two ducks, Fiddle and Fern and gave them free range around the yard. Winter came and they were unhappy in the barn, knee-high snow outside. One day, early spring, just about now...about the time of the crocuses, I started finding duck eggs, under shrubs, at the edge of the mowing, under a basket. A baby bunny appeared and disappeared (really it did,) and I thought THIS is how it all began, and long before the Easter Bunny at CVS, long, long before story of the tomb and the stone in Jerusalem started to be told.
Snoopy, fishing a woodland stream, with flowers and bees and trees. He's saying "I don't want a city on Mars. I don't want AI in every app. I don't want data centers in Space. I want clean water. I want affordable healthcare. And I want bees to survive.
A gray sky, gray-green pines, leafless birch and swamp maples, a field still brown, not quite awake to April.
Big old tree. Two stuffed animals in their new home in a hole in the trunk, a multi-colored bear and a red fluffy something with a white muzzle.
Forbes Library, Northampton MA March 25th, 2026 AT LEAST I'M NOT STUCK ON A ROCK? Fine is a Four-Letter-Word That Begins with F Conversation with a Bivalve in Blue Light Protest Driving Through Storms SPIDEY SENSES Argiope Aurantia Double Helix Why I'm Glad This Poem Is Not a Horse Of a Feather The Rapture Eagle STOP To Yaroslava The Nth November Point of View The Broadcast TWO ELEGIES Ursus Americanus Marked and Unmarked ZEN & BYE Radishes Other Sins More Deadly Mosses and Ivies
Blue sky, rays of sun just out of the frame, five buds of a tree magnolia. In the distance, a yellow field, a fence, a horizon of evergreens.
brown house siding and window. Below it a patch of snow on moss, a leggy broad-leafed tree and a white, not-so-clean fluffy doglette Luna.
Two fingers of a human hand, a forest in the background, a flat, transparent glass-like fish, spinal chord and brain stem visible, two eyes close together, a tiny mouth.
A blue sky, late afternoon, a full moon, the last sun touching the tops of naked trees and a telephone pole, a bank of snow, a road.
A short poem with no stanza breaks, titled TWENTY THOUSAND MISSILES Lost: the scent of pillows women placed near an open window, laundered with bluing and lavender, sun-plumped with spring air, and damp cases pinned downwind of the storm-proven orchard, white curtains, white walls, white apple blossoms. Three grown sisters, laughing in the kitchen. One, in oven mitts, holds up her hands. One, barefoot at the table, paints her toes. One, pregnant, amazed.
paw-prints on a snowy field and straight lines going in the same direction and then parallel.
Two neighborhood houses, one pale green and white, the other yellow. Then multiple feet of snow, a planted handmade sign, "Free Snow." A bit of shoveled sidewalk. Foreground, a red fire hydrant with a red plastic lollipop on a stick.
The east wing of The White House under demolition, looking like a bomb hit it, heavy equipment with a yellow bucket in operation, in the foreground a white pillar.
A picture of not-quite ripe peaches in bowls. The poem, from SWWIM Peaches and Patience By Emily Patterson From below the branches it’s easy to mistake a ripe leaf for a Red Haven, and the rapid rain that drives us under shallow eaves might be misconstrued as urgency, but nothing is urgent here: not the cattails blowzy by the pond; not my daughter’s short steps through sodden rows of unmown clover; not the sunny fuzz of each fruit’s underside, flesh that would be rosy if not for its own shadow. At home on the kitchen table, we tally our bounty: precisely forty peaches and not one ready, to my daughter’s dismay. Impatience, for all its false rush, has been my own longtime companion, and so I try not to shoo her grasping hands. How slowly I am learning to love: not only what takes time, but the time it takes.
A cartoon of two cats. One, puffed up, as cats do in extreme fright and fury. It says, "I've been reading the news all morning and now I"m stuck in puffy mode. The other answers, "I hate when that happens."
A rough but friendly snow friend on a dark day. Two branches for arms, twiggy hair, eyes and a smile.