Sunday Morning – Guest Poet

Spirited Away – Studio Ghibli

Sunday Morning Suffrages

Tuvan throat singing: a gravel riverbed
fills Sunday morning intangible
presence of the Bodhisattva in the

room one row red velour theater seats folded
vanished the houselights gone down the rowboat
lashed to a willow a shadow lies down to

sleep on the water this weekend’s finished this
sky’s prehistoric white even without clouds a
large framed poster: the train scene from Spitited

Away hangs on this cerulean wall be-
side dried pussy willow branches in a glass vase
alder catkins outdoors against a red brick

salt-streaked chimney no smoke to speak of two
sparrows sing their morning suffrages an
airplane churning the air makes its way in-

cessantly north to the river nothing to
see: river’s got nothing to nothing to say for
itself so far east of Astoria Bridge

Jack Hayes, The Tree of Life in November, 2025, Askance Publishing

The poems in The Tree of Life in November are “the creations of a man whose body said it needed rest before his spirit felt rest was necessary, written in a period when death, like the snow that recurs in the collection, was “coming not yet coming.” Life, like the maple bark in ‘The Tree of Life #8’ was peeling, “to be shed not yet.” They are a record of 14 months in a life nearing completion. The poet admits to having no idea what completion means, in the context of a life, “but it’s a meaning we’ll all discover in the fullness of time.”