Christopher Yokel's Blog

About

Chris is an Associate Professor of English at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts, and is an arts and culture writer whose works have appeared in publications such as, Tweetspeak Poetry, The Curator, The Molehill, and The Rabbit Room. Chris is also the author of several books of poetry, including his latest collection Autumn Poems. In 2018 he helped co-found The Poetry Pub, an online community for poets. He enjoys walking in the woods, visiting coffee shops, and poking through used bookstores with his wife Jen.

Email Chris

Rising Up

Sometimes I wonder
If I will ever sense
Your presence again,
but then, on a late April day
I feel it rising all around me
like the grass,
budding before me
like blossoms on the trees,
opening up inside like
something new and green.

For One Second I Felt Like Muhammad Ali

Riding down a back road
in southern Maryland
on a jankety old bike
With soft tires
that I found at our Airbnb,
I saw a black butterfly
with white edged wings
gliding alongside me
and for just a moment
we floated together. 

Photo by Clint McKoy on Unsplash  

Like Fog

Mostly
there are no actual words
exchanged between
You and I,
but sometimes,
I feel You
quietly settling down
all around me
like fog among the trees. 

Photo

Like the Soil

I haven’t written a whole lot of poetry these past few years, and sometimes I feel guilty about that–like I should be more prolific. This poem came out as a response against my own sense of shame.

I am not
a tickertape.
I cannot simply spit out
a constant stream 
of carefully crafted words. 

I am more like the soil
that receives the seed
that sits in darkness for a time,

nurturing in the depths
until it is 
time
to break forth. 

Poem: Like the Soil

I haven’t written a whole lot of poetry these past few years, and sometimes I feel guilty about that–like I should be more prolific. This poem came out as a response against my own sense of shame.

I am not
a tickertape.
I cannot simply spit out
a constant stream 
of carefully crafted words. 

I am more like the soil
that receives the seed
that sits in darkness for a time,

nurturing in the depths
until it is 
time
to break forth. 

December 9

The last
yellowed leaves
of autumn
fall
on the 
first fresh snow
of winter. 

Poem: December 9

The last
yellowed leaves
of autumn
fall
on the 
first fresh snow
of winter. 

River of Stars

This piece was written as part of a collaboration with visual artist Kyra Hinton for The Rabbit Room’s Hutchmoot: Homebound Pass the Piece project. You can view/purchase a print of the connected artwork here. 

We cannot see the River of Stars where the Great Bear swims and the Hunter stalks, and so we have no more myths to make of them. Scientists say more than eighty percent of the world’s population live under light-polluted skies, oblivious to the nightly flow of the cosmos. The Babylonians said the Milky Way was the severed tail of the dragoness Tiamat, the Greeks that it was the milk dripping from Hera’s heavy breasts. The Maori say it is the canoe of the warrior Tama Rereti, and the Khosians of the Kalahari say a little girl cast fiery embers into the sky. It is the strewn treasure trail of fleeing thieves, and the flight path of birds at season’s change. Our astronomers tell us it is a barrel spiral galaxy of four hundred billion stars and planets, two hundred thousand light years across from one side to the other, swirling around a supermassive black hole. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great to understand, and so I must turn to these metaphors and myths to make sense of mystery. And then there is You, the man behind the starry curtain, the One who is said to know them each by name. I can recall Betelgeuse and Alpha Centauri, Pollux and Castor and Canus Major, but after that memory starts to fail. Is this bright band, I wonder, just the hem of Your garment? Do you cast the cosmos about You as a cloak? Do you see me, see all of us mortals, floating out here in the River of Stars?