Authors /
Charles Hughes
Charles Hughes’s poetry collections are The Evening Sky (2020) and Cave Art (2014), both published by Wiseblood.
The Flowers and the River
at the Walking Bridge
at the Walking Bridge
Late-season black-eyed Susans, stooped but tall, Their softening evening yellows well-worn velvet In the low sunlight, acquiesced to fall, ...
August 21, 2023
Mid-October
Birds flying too high for me to see what birds.
Crows, if I had to guess, five or six crows,
All rising higher, higher, only to fall
A little way, then rise again, compose...
October 11, 2022
At twilight
The sun had lost its glare and some of its heat.
People arrived, stood talking, looked for seats.
Children resisted parents’ pleas to sit...
August 10, 2022
The beginning of spring
2021...
March 14, 2022
O Ophelia!
Impeccable August sky, blue ice except
The splotch of incandescent sun. I’m reading,
In the bright daylight of days like today,...
August 5, 2021
Night comes
Unspecific guilt
(He chalked it up to old age)
Pursued him full tilt,
As storm winds bear down
On the defenseless outskirts
Of a struggling town...
January 7, 2021
Good move, 1962
Fifties split-level, clapboards olive green
When we moved in that June. Big trees green, too.
(We’d come from a gaunt, treeless subdivision.)...
May 28, 2020
On the first anniversary of my father’s death
Rain, early March rain
Heaving against the windows;
March storms in again,
All bluster, as though
Intending to remind me
Of something I know:...
March 2, 2020
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“Fear not, little flock”
(Luke 12:32)
This morning—outdoors, walking—
I count the birds I see:
Clouded late winter sunlight
Discloses only three—...
February 21, 2020
Winter birds
“But what about the birds that don’t fly south?”
A boy—age six?—arms full of books—is asking.
The library is closing. We’re in line....
December 13, 2019
Her words are light
In memory of Dorothy Parkander, scholar and teacher (1925–2018)
How strong I feel the sun!
I feel the rain some days
That strong. Today is one:...
February 27, 2019

Poetry for a world that’s falling apart
Jeremiah Webster charts a via negativa in verse.
October 18, 2018
October Friday
A boy is walking home from seventh grade,
Happy because it’s Friday and because
Pure sun is setting leaves on fire, although
He doesn’t really see the reds and golds...
October 5, 2018
En plein air, September
This bus stop in late sun—
Bench, narrow, backless, low,
In black-framed kiosk, all
Metal and plexiglass,
All sides enclosed but one—
Today turns studio...
September 5, 2018