Salt Ponds Pentecost

by Michael Lancaster

Kingfishers muttering furiously
Bordering the life of a family
Known in a clothes line
Of six pairs of jeans pinned
Upon a lifeline of wire
Stretched from weathered shed
To a post anchoring its
Occasional fabric burdens
As well as a line of tomato plants
Scrambling into spring
Amid the clarion wake-up
Call of red-winged blackbirds
Providing descant and the
Promise of indolent summer.

Mike Lancaster is a retired Army veteran, West Point Class of 1967, and a combat veteran helicopter gunship pilot with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. Mike and his wife Ellen live on the Salt Ponds, just above Fort Monroe, in the Tidewater area of Virginia. Mike mostly writes poetry about Salt Ponds life and its spiritual quality, though two other volumes of poems and a good sketch of a novel are works in progress.