What does it say about you,
That I write you letters
After you’re gone,
That I searched the stars
To write this poem,
What does it say about you?
Father’s Day 2022
23 Thursday Jun 2022
Posted in Poetry
A Hope For Something Better
24 Tuesday May 2022
Tags
Attention, clouds, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Earth, Hope, Life, Loss, Mindfulnesses, Murder, Poem, Poems, Poetry, School Shooting, Souls, Uvalde Texas, Yearning
Would our lives be better
If we paid attention
Each drip drip
Each rustle and bow of leaves
The branches of the pine are dancing
To a song in 4/4 time
So is the purple sand cherry, dancing
Clouds upon clouds upon clouds
Let me describe them:
flat, dark bottoms, mountainous tufts
Bodies extending far into the sky
For sun, sun lighting up their top halves
I should say, the earth side is ominous
The heavenward side, radiant
Would you know what I mean
Today, of all days
When so many innocent are dead
Why wouldn’t they turn their eyes away
And hope for something better
How We Keep It
23 Monday May 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Death, Death Poems, Doe Mountain, Dying, Father, Infinite, Life, Loss, Love, Memory, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Spirits
Moments, so beautiful they are painful,
Unless you take a deep breath
And carry them into your heart & lungs
Where they mix with the sweet oxygen
Of your body’s blood, pulse, beat, throb.
And you think, I will keep this, Lord,
Help me keep the memory of it,
Let me be changed forever to the goodness,
Yes, even the holiness of this moment.
(Because what is this, if not sacred?)
A poem can keep it, too, and as I read back,
I feel you in the flashing memory spots,
Where touch and sight and smell,
Ignite the latent feeling of you, still alive.
There you are, rising with other wonders:
The geese, flying through basalt cliffs,
The view, after ascending Doe Mountain,
The ocean, when I had not seen the ocean.
There you are among it all, in my mind,
And I can feel your love from this far away.
Skunk Cabbage
19 Thursday May 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Death, Fear, Fear of Death, Hope, Life, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Promise, Quartzite Mt, Skunk Cabbage, Spirit, Spirits, spring poem, Survival, Truth, Yearning
No, I did not bend down too near
To smell the yellow flower
Which grew in weaving lines through
The swampy crack, the scraggly creek,
Creeping amid mid-high, mid-spring grass.
We were at the base of Quartzite Mountain,
Nestled behind a tiny ski town, ghost town,
When the skiers don’t ski, or snowboard,
Or venture icy roads to snow-topped peaks.
You said the clicking was cicada,
I said, cougar, because I’d seen a video
Of a cougar making a clicking-ticking sound,
And decided the next clicking-ticking
Behind a bush, or tree, or grassy knoll,
Would be a mountain lion. You see,
We will never know who was right,
Because we passed safely the miles up,
The miles back down the hill, to the creek,
With those most beautiful, yellow flowers;
You could see them recede into the woods,
Like mystery, like scattered crumbs,
Showing us the way to an unknown truth.
I followed them for awhile, alone,
While you stayed back, and packed the dog;
Those irresistible, extra steps along their path,
Like blazing torches, luminous, yes.
What Was Lost in the Trade
15 Sunday May 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Children, Division, Divorce, Family, Hate, Healing, Life, Longing, Loss, Love, Love Poems, Marriage, Memory, Mothers, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacred, Self, Souls, Women's Poems, Yearning
The push, and pull, of memory,
When you left me I got sadness, despair,
When I left you, I got amnesia.
Be careful what you forget,
Memories, hostage to one another,
Shoved into the abyss, together they go,
What was beautiful, too,
The joy of holding his babies at my breasts,
The sound of love in first words;
Hope, like a childhood dream,
You’re embarrassed you believed.
And now, no plumbing the hole
With dirty hands, arms not long enough
To reach what was so easily given away;
(The hurt was not traded for living,
As I’d hoped,) no, I want them all back,
Though they bring you, with the sadness, too.
One Swan, One Last Kiss of a Bee
12 Thursday May 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Beauty, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Happiness, Hog Lake Falls, Hope, Infinite, Life, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, prairie smoke, Prayer, Sacred, Soul, Soul Poetry, Souls, Spirit, Spirits, Spring, spring poem, Survival, The Universe, Truth, Yearning
Hog Lake Falls, a cool breeze,
One single, solitary swan.
I think I see him preening
From this vantage, far away.
Last time I hiked here, you’d just died,
And I thought, how lovely to know
I can bring you with me,
Free of the dying chair,
The dying bed, the whole dying room,
And house, where you’d locked yourself away.
Such days are ripe with feeling alive:
Prairie smoke droop their heads,
Their beautiful faces turned down,
As they wait for the kiss of a bee.
Then they will finally look up at the sky,
Say one last prayer, go to seed.
The Knowing Alone
01 Friday Apr 2022
Tags
Alone, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Grief, Healing, Life, Loneliness, Loss, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Souls, Spirit, Spirits, Spring, Survival, Yearning
They say,
There are five stages to grief;
All, feel terrible;
Where’s the relief?
When can we expect
To accept the loss of being
Who we were together.
The knowing alone–
Is that it, the end;
Is it final?
Mending spirit,
Where are you now?
Are the returning birds
Too loud to hear?
The Sun, too bright
To see?
The wind, too cold
To feel you?
Dimensions Around Us, Heaven
14 Monday Mar 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Belief, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Eternity, Heaven, Hope, Infinite, Loss, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacred, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Spirits, Survival, The Universe
If there’s a heaven,
Who’s to say
It’s not right here,
Next to us,
Rather than far away?
Another dimension,
Our souls
Walk through at death,
More whole,
than in life.
Scientists say,
Our lives replay,
As we pass,
They can map
Our brain’s waves,
An almighty flash
Of memory cells,
Flashing.
What’s that about,
If not
Making us better?
And so
I talk to him,
In woods and fields,
My father,
Who loved woods
And mountaintops,
And me,
Less alone than before
He walked across,
Or flew across,
Or emerged across
The invisible line
Between life
And death,
The breadth of which,
Seems smaller
Than I knew before.
My Father, In Dreams
13 Sunday Mar 2022
Posted in Poetry
Toward Our Once Bright Existence
03 Thursday Feb 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Aging, Beauty, Belief, Children, Death, Dying, Eternity, Family, Gratitude, Hope, Life, Loss, Love, Memory, Mothers, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Spirits
In the end, we don’t know
How the end will come,
Peaceful, as we sleep,
Or, under the thumb
Of morphine. Memories,
Like flotsam, from the depths
Of our once bright existence,
Form a tunnel toward our exit,
Each day, one step closer,
Almost touching what was lost:
mother, child, father.
A Broken Thing
26 Wednesday Jan 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Broken, Children, Division, Divorce, Family, Forgiveness, Life, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Snake River
I’d be lying, if I said I didn’t know,
Years of turmoil, like a river,
With a dangerous undertow.
Like swimmers, outside their boat,
Unable to swim, thrown against rocks.
We were young, and bound together
By our children. Then, the talk:
You don’t love me, he said,
And, rather than saying it wasn’t true,
I asked, what does love have to do
With being married? We have kids.
We were pulled over, under a bridge,
Which spans the mighty Snake River.
We were both wrong, but does it matter?
Self-fulling, breakup chatter–
Prelude to the email I would find–
Betrayal, is not a kind way to end.
Twenty years later, still not friends,
Yet, we are friendly in our pain.
The sting of loss, defines a sting,
And taints our world, a broken thing.
Diminished, But Singing
04 Tuesday Jan 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Courage, Death, Fall, Healing, Hope, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Song of Sorrow and Joy, Soul Poetry, Strength, Survival, Truth, Winter poem, Yearning
You must admit,
a song of sadness
Is a decent song;
A song of rage,
The songs we banged to
In our younger age,
That made us stand
And raise our fists–
Is better yet.
The rage is gone.
Somedays, sadness, too,
And happy tunes
Are few.
Yet, sing we must
To shake the silent woods.
Our souls,
They still have much to say,
Of getting past, beyond,
The dull,
Diminished days.
The Edges Begin to Blur
02 Sunday Jan 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Aging, Belief, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Eternity, Fear of Death, Infinite, Life, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Survival, Winter poem
A fog over the snow-covered hills
Of the Palouse, loosed delineation
Of hill and road and sky,
It seemed an infinity of cloud,
A shroud, over our eyes,
As we returned from a ‘last visit,’
The one where we said ‘goodbye.’
A great chain is about to snap,
The ties that bind crackle,
Grow weak, tremble, cry:
This too shall pass, everything must die,
But at last, we don’t believe it’s true,
Do we? Life is all we’ve known,
And its roads extend for our ever,
And ‘our ever,’ doesn’t come to a tidy end,
But it does begin to blur at the edges.
2022
01 Saturday Jan 2022
Tags
Gratitude, Happiness, Hope, Life, Love, New Year, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Spirit, Survival, Yearning
The past,
And its happiness,
Sadness,
Must its minor role
Encompass,
As we seek renewal,
And move forward
Into the unknown
Abyss of a world
Made new by one day,
One day,
A New Year—
Think of it—
A chance,
A calling,
A maxim:
To start again.
Happy New Year, Friends everywhere!
Lost Child New Year
31 Friday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
Christmas is gone, and I am glad.
Does that make me a bad person,
I asked my husband, last night.
Can the child, finally, be lost forever?
Or is it latent, still, observing from afar?
If the child dies, does the body follow?
Those who live to one hundred
Always see themselves younger,
Or so I read, the others, dead,
Cannot speak to this.
Katherine died before Christmas;
Did she see herself sixty-five,
Or forty-five? Did she realize,
Or did she fantasize–hope?
It’s a fragile thing, hope.
The world conspires against hope.
And now, twenty twenty-two,
Tomorrow, we say, is New,
New, but is it really?
The latent child wants to speak;
I can’t hear what she’s saying–
Something about trying again,
To be better, to believe, to trust–
What is it I must do, child?
The Not So Little Things
29 Wednesday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Aging, Death, Family, Fathers, Forgiveness, Happiness, Hope, Life, Love, Memory, My Dad, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Souls, Survival, Winter
“Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house. (Directive, Robert Frost)
1.
The frosty backs of horses at the bale,
The red fence, framing the snow,
This is the beauty I found
In the extreme cold
of December.
And I remember
Wishing for it.
2.
Do you want to save this bird,
It was a falcon,
And it ran, with broken wing,
At the edge
Of a barbed wire fence.
He asked me, as he knew
I was a lover of wild things,
And a nurturer of broken wings.
I do, I said, I do.
Then, he was out of the car,
Walking among snow
And wounded bird.
I watched him from the backseat,
The car, I would someday wreck.
But that day, it was whole,
And we were whole,
And he returned, victorious,
Gloved hands,
Cradling broken bird.
3.
I don’t know why he gave it to her,
But she was in possession
Of his cowboy hat,
And she knew
I was the one who wanted it.
I was in possession of money,
And funny prankster that she was,
My sister knocked on my bedroom door.
She was having a yard sale in her room,
And I was invited to shop.
I can’t remember how much I spent,
But the hat became mine,
and I was wearing it.
He laughed when he saw me,
His big hat on my small head,
And heard the story of its quick journey
From her to me–
He’d given it to her for free–
But I didn’t care,
I wore that damn hat everywhere.
4.
Before I wrecked his car,
I slid his truck off an icy road
At two am, in a snowstorm.
I remember hiking to the first house,
And a man answered the door
In his underwear, staring dumbly
At me. I was desperate for a phone
To call my dad, praying he’d pick up,
Otherwise, I’d be stuck
With the undressed stranger.
He did, and soon my dad was sliding
down the dangerous hill,
In the car I’d soon wreck.
Next, he held his metal two-ton jack,
And ratcheted the truck up, and off,
And up and off, back
Onto the road, where the ice melted,
And the snow turned to rain,
And the sky filled with lightning,
But we survived, and now,
We can laugh at this story.
Preparing for Infinity
25 Saturday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Death, Death Poems, Eternal, Hope, Infinite, Infinity, Life, Love, Multiverse, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Spirit, Survival, The Universe, Unity
In his last days, he contemplates this:
In the multiverse, our universe,
In the universe, our galaxy,
In the galaxy, our solar system,
And in that, our planet,
Where you find us,
Small as we are,
Celebrating
What it means to be eternal,
To join the stars,
To become one with love,
Two points on a line,
That extend forever.
The Chimes of Winter
23 Thursday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
The chimes of summer,
Are the same chimes as winter,
Hear them dangle their tangled songs,
As we wait for the cold snap,
As we waited through the heat wave,
As the birds sang, and died,
As the dog died,
As everything waits to die now,
Snatched in snow and cold.
Our lives play out,
The seasons bang on,
The seasons leave behind,
Like some great train,
With its clang and clack,
Plowing through snow and rain,
Unloading its passengers.
Song of Sorrow and Joy: 5
12 Sunday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
Song of Sorrow and Joy: 4
11 Saturday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Death, Death Poems, Dying, Family, Forgiveness, Life, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Song of Sorrow and Joy, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Yearning
IV
Sit, and let me sing you a song,
Of our perfection,
And our imperfections:
No species sucks so bad
At getting what we want—
I’ll title it, Love.
Realization must come
Too late, or it’s not human.
Only in losing do we understand
The full measure of what we had,
Basically, chances, and with chance,
The opportunity to grasp —
It—
And I’m back to the title of the song—
Love,
And how we suck at it.
Bits of Poetry 