Sample poems
From recent or pending collections
Citizens of the Wind
Go then, citizen
Of the wind.
Finding the glass, the ice in joy,
the clean cold of it, the light
entering and bent and set free,
because I didn’t know I felt it
till it had flown off to a branch
too high up in the trees to see.
This morning little chips of joy
rain down on us, whiten the deck,
a momentary shock of winter.
A snow-colored cloud shades the bay,
but beyond it the ice-blue waves
burn in another realm of light,
a kind of brightness, a kind of joy
opening my eyes, setting a course
for no known point in land or sea.
What is this atmosphere of light,
kaleidoscopic palette of change?
I love the dark brilliance of it
coming on wind, the sudden lull
allowing birds to fall and feed
before they are flung on the air.
The Hudson Review, Summer 2026
The Extinction of the Dinosaurs
Here the sward began.
Beyond the grass, a patch of tacit cacti,
invisible, but somehow felt
whenever you wandered barefoot out of bounds.
And there was water,
both for drinking and splashing about.
There were heat from the sun,
stars for mythology.
Our little brains had just discerned
that this was Paradise, when
with the usual stupidity and greed of men
it was rendered and commodified.
We had no need of meteorites
to bring about our end.
The Hudson Review, Summer 2026
To the Other Planets
If you are listening, no need to tell us
what you hear. We know the rifle shots,
the sputtering canisters of gas
and the other gas that makes a small girl
or boy dance giggling in the house.
We know the sound a cow makes
scratching her back on a low branch,
the scratch of the crow’s call, the woof
of its wings in flight, the sea receiving
a pelican’s hell-for-leather splash,
the daughter laughing in her mother’s arms
just now, guitar and ukulele
finding each other’s tunings.
We know the illusion of silence
that hangs between us in the night,
the bar fight staggering to a stop,
the stopping bus, its wheeze of brakes
and rattle of opening doors,
the thump of a wallaby’s tail,
the nearly-dinosaur sound
of bison chomping grass,
the symphony, piano solo
from an open window, love
crying it’s “I” out, sirens
ecstatic with emergency,
beggar’s curse, rumble
of traffic. The awkward chord
kept hidden in a practice room,
the new attempt and the one
after that, and after that
the head bent still
over the patient instrument,
that breathing you can hardly hear
clouding the patient’s mask,
the sound a tree makes
when the wind takes it,
the way the sea becomes a forest,
the forest a sea, and the same
for everything inside us
going further and further
from what we call the light.
We know the speed of fire and water,
and we know too
what it means to listen,
really to listen
when another speaks,
which may of all things come
closest to love.
from Pacific Light
Cold Fire
I
The man about to set the ground on fire
casts an eye to a tremor in a gum tree.
Grandfather. A yellow-throated honeyeater.
His claimed relation, knowledge or mystery,
shames my scientific doubt. His burning brand
purifies with smoke each blade and twig we see,
offers a blessing to every ant at hand,
warns the beetle to move now. Cold fire coming.
He says cold fire will creep across the land
and nudge echidna out of her dark homing.
He says the fire is slow but animals should run.
He kneels to earth, half-singing and half-humming.
Grandfather looking on, cold fire will come.
Bow down to the smoke, cold fire will come.
II
Across the ocean in the Ring of Fire
lived a people native to the rain.
The old volcanoes rose up high and higher,
bald snowy domes above the farming plain,
the wet cathedral forest streaked with light
that hardly touched the floor. I’m there again
in soil so deep it seems to build the night
from rotting cedars, chaos of meshed limbs,
the spider webs like filaments of mind.
These are the makings of my native hymns,
my breath clouds nakedly in air like smoke,
cold fire inside me, outside me. It climbs
as the eye climbs on the updraft of the smoke.
My breath is rising like a cloud of smoke.
III
Basalt crystals, like organ pipes in snow.
Snow melted back in wells around each fir
from the body heat of tree, and deep below,
the drum of permafrost began to stir.
The drum would sound when people walked upon it,
a beat of boots among the roots and heather.
And every mountain rose up to its limit.
One could not tell the water from the wind
or from the breath of all that moved within it.
The burn was sunlight where the air grew thin.
The firs hung down their beards of Spanish moss
and hid the winking ruin of a mine.
The glaciers calved in water fresh as loss.
Down through the years came water. Water and loss.
IV
Cold fire discovers as it moves. It is no saint
and martyrs nothing that it touches when it burns
the twigs and bark, leaving a trace of faint
white ash the game and birds will feed upon.
I burn a cold fire here that runs in lines,
a sound like laughter and the hurt that learns.
Cold fire takes and teaches, and it talks in signs
until the fire and smoke are gone. And then it sings.
The Hudson Review, Summer 2024
Are we still here?
Between the woodpile and the window
a line of small black ants is moving,
some to the north, some to the south.
Their constant industry is admirable,
as are their manners when they pause
in meeting to exchange a touch.
I must have brought their home inside
for fuel, heating my small house.
And if it burned I too would move
along all points of the compass rose,
touching my neighbors on the path.
(2018)
The Mud Room
His muddy rubber boots
stood in the farmhouse mud room
while he sat in the kitchen,
unshaven, dealing solitaire.
His wife (we called her Auntie)
rolled out dough in the kitchen
for a pie, put up preserves
and tidied, clearing her throat.
They listened to the TV
at six, he with his fingers
fumbling the hearing aids,
she watching the kitchen clock.
Old age went on like that,
a vegetable patch, a horse
some neighbor kept in the barn,
the miles of grass and fences.
After he died his boots
stood muddy in the mud room
as if he’d gone in socks,
softly out to the meadow.
(2017)
Read and hear sample poems and translations of David’s work on other sites
‘Old Shoes’ on Rattle (text and audio)
‘Fathers and Sons’ from The New Yorker
15 poems by David on the Poetry Foundation website
‘Windward’ in the Times Literary Supplement
‘Note to Self’ on Rattle (text and audio)
‘An Old Man’ by C.P. Cavafy, translated from the Greek by David Mason in Rattle (text and audio)
Two poems in The Hudson Review (text and audio)
Four more poems in The Hudson Review
‘Epiphany, 1937’ by George Seferis, translated from the Greek by David Mason (The Hudson Review)
(Subscribers to The Hudson Review gain access to dozens of poems, articles and reviews by David. Outside the US, online access is USD25 per year.)