patterns

 of a shape in the branches

pareidolia:

the drive within us

to see understandable pattern

when objectively there is just the random,

I sit here in piedmont North Carolina,

writing of petroglyphs,

writing of the people of the American Southwest,

and of what they wrote in stone,

before me dead oak branches

hold, for awhile, without their leaves,

and my eyes create a shape

that looks to me like a human figure,

caught in movement,

like a shape I have seen on stone before,

 do we find or create the patterns

we see in the world around us?

by Henry H. Walker

July 22, ‘26