Lois Read
Lois Read Poems
The lone red
most ordinary tulip
in the front garden
has surprisingly mmorphed
...
She was a perfect composition sitting there
broad brown face with smile as white as lilies,
red rebozo, red pail of flowers,
skirts spread around her like an audience.
...
Words resound in my soul like gongs
or the bells in the Buddhist temple
where the saffron-clad boy-monk
sidled close to me on the bench
...
Bright blue bits of sky
assert themselves
through soft spring scrim
bell the morning
...
Shrill whistles pierce the country calm
as peacocks flounce florescent tails.
Imprisoned in their corsets, ladies
...
A poet I know said
God is a radish.
I thought about that for a long time,
trying to make a connection
...
I pick up
shells and stones and sea glass
wave-glazed and glossy still
on early morning beach walks
...
I am red, surrounded by purple
color my life, the scent of my breath
I eat it, drink it bathe in it daily
...
I cannot grasp
the enormity of 'billions'
or imagine the color
of a universe as yet unknown.
...
Listen for the bird singing two mountains away.
Leap-frog over sounds of morning
dogs barking
chisels hitting stone
children shouting to school
...
The whoops of joy erupting
from the school playground at recess
into the hot Mexican sky
are not Spanish sounds, but universal language
...
The glass of wild broom on the bathroom shelf
one petal already fallen
yellow on warm oiled wood
says hurry outside
...
(the first line of the poem is from Emily Dickinsen)
Angels rent the house nest ours wherever we remove
...
The dream is full of things missing
letters needed to make words
a missed train to Tokyo
...
'You were dancing with the flowers'
he said
as I came in with my sketch pad and paints
and then with a twinkle
...
St. Paul said
'Faith, Hope and Love abode. these three
but the greatest of these is love'
words quoted at weddings over and over.
...
Some days I feel like
slathering the scent of fresh-cut grass
behind my ears, adding
perhaps just a touch
...
Tiny yellow butterflies
stop kissing purple tips of sage
to dance inside my eyelids
as I try to nap
...
Lois Read Biography
Lois Read, retired Art Teacher, began writing poems in the 1980s, has been published in The Connecticut River Review, winning a 'best in issue' for her poem Barefoot Queen. She has published two chapbooks, is preparing to publish a third.)
The Best Poem Of Lois Read
Do Not Go Gentle (Title From Dylan Thomas)
The lone red
most ordinary tulip
in the front garden
has surprisingly mmorphed
into something new
something exotic
as though it shed its
workday clothes
and donned
a red satin cloak with
black velvet sleeves edged in gold
such as a sultan
or oriental potentate
would wear.
In these, its last days
it stands alone still on
single stem amid spring sprouts
not decorously dropping petals
one be one, but
proudly, with grand hauteur
dispensing alms
to lesser beings,
reciting Dylan Thomas.
Lois Read Comments
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3/26/2026 9:36:00 PM # 1.0.0
The Vibrant Palette of a Poet's Mind, July 16,2013 By William F. Dougherty (West Hartford, CT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) This review is from: Breathing Color: Poems by Lois Read (Paperback) Lois Read's verbal brushwork in Breathing Color, a collection of poems that melds visual imagery, allusions to the visual arts, and the singing colors of diverse topographical or place poems, evokes the classical concept of ut picture poesis- a speaking picture. What radiates from her poems is not merely an impasto of description but the pulmonary [spiritual breath of life] processing of coloring vision. Like Arachne's singing tapestries, she hangs variegated scenes and topics from the museum of her mind- landscapes exhaled as the mood-scapes of her iridescent memory in arresting lines like the Easter event in which an angel dabs a paintbrush in liquid sunlight, swipes it against the twig-tops next to skunk cabbage: / a chartreuse shout/ in rose-brown woods. Wading into Lois Read's gallery of tones and techniques is, as she suggests in Purple Shorts, like a swim through raspberry swirls. Or to conclude, knitting diamonds of colors into Argyle Socks in Philosophy 101 that profundities do not suit everyone; that joy accrues from patterned descendants that found form as I struggled/ To be what I am not. Breathing Color is a joy of many hues.