Poem Renaissance – Ralph Stevens

Gyroscope Review is celebrating National Poetry Month with a Poem Renaissance, a review of previously published poems looking for new life and new views. Every day through May 20^th, a new poem to fall in love with all over again.

Lyric, Sometimes Quiet
by Ralph Stevens

A song might be no more
than someone’s breath in your ear,
the clinking of a knife
in a jam jar. The fire in the stove
is said to sing, or even the old clock.
That storm last night ripped
a crazy arm from the big maple.
It lies across the driveway
waiting for the saw but
it hummed while yielding to the wind. 
Listen, we said
as we lay together in the early hours,
meaning the wind but
it was really the tree that sang
in the quiet violence of air,
which was itself a kind of song 
along with all singing things—
sunlight, snow melting on a roof,
the plaster of old walls cracking,
the ploughman in the painting,
dividing the earth without a sound


                    Originally published variously including in Verse-Virtual, An Online Community Journal of Poetry.



Retired from a career teaching college English, Ralph Stevens lives in Ellsworth, Maine. Stevens has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the author of At Bunker Cove (Moon Pie Press, 2017), Things Haven’t Been the Same (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Water under Snow (Wipf&Stock) and Somehow Balanced (Kelsay Books). He is a regular contributor to Verse Virtual, and his poems have appeared in a variety of publications and on the radio programs The Writer’s Almanac and Poems from Here.

Don’t forget to read the Spring 2025 Issue, available now, online and in print

Previous Renaissance Poets

April Poets