Michael Sturdy

“The Three Fathers.”

Three fathers walk beside us through the years:
One gives a name the mouth cannot retain;
One teaches silence through our lesser fears;
One gathers loss and fashions it to gain.

The first is known by footprints in the snow,
A door half-open where the lamplight falls;
His voice remains where vanished rivers flow,
A distant echo lingering in halls.

The second keeps his watch behind the eye,
Correcting shadows no one else can see;
He bends the branch before the bough grows high
And leaves no mark save what the heart may be.

The third arrives disguised in borrowed years:
The face is strange, yet somehow reappears.

And still some thread, though hidden in the loom,
Draws root from absence, flower from the tomb;

So love persists, uncertain of its source,
Like starlight reaching us by its own course.

M. Sturdy (June 5th, 2026)

"The Discovery." Watercolor on Cotton Bond.

“The Ferryman’s Toll.”

The ferryman waits past the lantern’s flare;
I fear the tide where all day-signals die.
Each night I pay a coin to vanish there.

The harbor bells dissolve in thinning air;
The piers grow small beneath a sightless sky.
The ferryman waits past the lantern’s flare.

The ledger of the hours lies open where
The dark collects what daylight cannot buy;
Each night I pay a coin to vanish there.

What cargo leaves? What passenger? What share
Returns at dawn beneath the eastern dye?
The ferryman waits past the lantern’s flare.

The moon hangs pale above the channel’s snare,
A tarnished seal upon a contract dry;
Each night I pay a coin to vanish there.

Yet every seed must trust the furrow’s care,
And every star descend before it fly.

The ferryman waits past the lantern’s flare;
Each night I pay a coin to vanish there.

--M. Sturdy (June 4th, 2026)

“The Garden’s Error.”

When Spring arrays her court in robes of flame,
The tulip lifts a chalice to the sun,
And roses, red with pride, proclaim their name
As though the work of beauty were well done.

Yet at the hedge the nameless thistle stands,
A ragged prophet clothed in hooks and gray;
The dandelion spreads her golden hands
Where kings of petals briefly hold their sway.

We choose the bloom because it wears a crown,
And cast the w**d beyond the garden wall;
We bless the branch that bends with blossoms down,
Yet curse the root that feeds and binds them all.

Thus man, like gardeners drunk on fragrant lies,
Kills what endures and crowns what quickly dies.

--M. Sturdy (June 4th, 2026)