Welcome to The RavensPerch

Low lying fog Dense and wispy infuses dreams and permeates betweenness. I wear dents of your love. No longer bruised But there are shadows and ghosts That occasionally say hello.

If you would listen, you would hear the forget-me-nots that sing in my heart. Sometimes there is a chorus when the sunflowers, gladiolas, and irises have something to celebrate. You are deaf to all of it. I am exiled to float on a cloud of insignificance as you sip...

I went to sleep for ten years. While not awake, I lost my skin. Registration logs noted that my skin never checked out. Lost and found did not have my skin. Perhaps my skin was donated to Goodwill. I get strange looks walking down the boulevard - wondering who would...

I am flying home To you My Michigan With your lakes And forests And birds My heart lifts With the plane As our journey begins My roots Lie beneath the surface Of your land My memories Lie within the borders Of your beauty My soul Remembers the start Of my journey...

each morning now as I add a layer and lightly turn up the heat my slippers a blanket and your purring warmth warm me from the outside while my coffee warms me from the inside as I wait for the sun to shine but I am bracing for the chill this season brings...

I am already mourning summer and autumn is just here when winter arrives I will mourn autumn but … when spring blows in I will rejoice for summer is only a breath away

Begin with a morning when clocks tick without urgency: no one has meetings, there is no school, even the frantic city recedes to the quiet thump of a newspaper hitting the front walk. Add a father descending the stairs: his step must be light, his face free of the...

In the dining room of what was once our cottage, my brother lifts his glass, half-filled with iced tea, into a shaft of sunlight. Amber liquid sparkles, the color of a good day melting into evening. He looks through the liquid and remembers my grandfather holding his...

Moonlight paints water, colors blend, bleeding towards the shore. Light pulses on wave peaks, enticing my eyes in darkness. Alone in bed, behind a window, framed, I am bewitched by this brilliant orb. I climb from my window, slide through shadows of trees, soar from...

Fire light flashed across floorboards, like moonbeams over waves. I stood where it caressed the shore. With an invitation, I placed my hull upon your water. A buoyant force pressed against me as I immersed myself in you. We rocked. Your waves lapped against me: a...

The heart draws near, submitting as it falls. Vessels filled with light unfurl, pulsating into pockets prior unseen. Illuminating them briefly, a kaleidoscope of colors swirl. Warmth wakes life there, begging to be beheld. Swiftly, darkness clots, circulation ceases,...

Paper without words Air without breeze Silence in the Meeting House                     (will my voice speak?)                                  (sing?)   Marian Kaplun Shapiro, a practicing psychologist in Lexington, Mass., is the author of a professional book,...

Our wedding picture, sixty years ago! The sun was brighter then, the lunatic moon madder, driving the urgency of our love to wilder, sillier laughter then. And love— what we called love, passion—that crazy wine— held us giddy, dazzling along our veins. But time!...

To Zakai, two weeks old You newly born to a world at the tipping point what can I advise or warn or urge? For I have grown unaccustomed to the world, which has no use for the little I have to give— some artful webs of words, poems to tease the moment, but with no...

His hooked, thrusting beak batters the perfect arches of the shell to burst that sky of chalk. The hatched hawk staggers, naked and wet—agape with greed, ravening, flightless—grows toward flight, trampling the bright fragments down to dung. Mere song, mere art seems...

        From here we can watch her, you and I, we can follow her slow, her heavy ninth-month pace as she sways and rocks along those plum-tree flowers, trailing through petal and stem her tremulous hands,         enticing the wind-laden blooms to kiss her palms, to...

I am the red talisman of a greater America and the test of its nation’s creed I am the green amulet in the crown of the Statue of Liberty I am the diatribe stomping tribal djembe drumming elephant stomping across the land for water for the children I am the vast...