Green Leaves

Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems collects work from Eric Paul Shaffer's seven volumes and thirty-five years of publication. On voyages around the Pacific Rim, from California to Okinawa to Hawai'i, Shaffer's sharp eye for natural and human detail delights and illuminates. A charter member of the "Clear Pool School," Shaffer writes direct, profound, and often funny poems celebrating the American vernacular and encouraging a broader sense of the human, humane, ecological, and planetary.

Lāhaina Noon

Today, I'm a shadowless man.
The sun calls me into the street,
and I walk alone into the light of noon.
The moment has come.

I stand quietly on Front Street
balancing the sun on my head.
My shadow crawls in my ear
to hide in the small, dark world

of my skull. The sun illuminates
the shadow in my skin, and I shine
like a second moon, reflecting
all the light I cannot contain.