14 Tuesday Feb 2023
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Daughter, Divorce, Love, Love Poems, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Valentine’s Day
She is the child of a marriage lost,
Tossed into the ashes,
A heap of wanting to forget everything,
Except her, our baby girl, born
On a day they invented for love.
My Valentine,
From the man I forgot.
Life, and love, go on,
Like they said they do–
On that, they did not lie.
She is a grown woman now,
Married, has her own child.–
Aww, life, love, yearning, and hurt;
It is all gloriously entwined today.
01 Monday Aug 2022
Posted in Poetry
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.
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.
26 Tuesday Jan 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Anger, Blood, Civil War, Death Poems, Divorce, Forgiveness, Hate, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Souls, Violence, War
If air could bleed,
the space between us
would, indeed, pour out.
Hate is a balm
for our hurt,
and the danger
we fear,
becomes anger.
My dear,
Are we beyond healing?
Or, is there yet
a latent spark
of forgiveness?
Remember when
we so easily embraced:
bone against bone,
a crushing lust,
our mutual love.
But now there’s dust,
and if the space between
could bleed,
it would drown us.
02 Sunday Aug 2020
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Alone, Chaos, CoronaVirus, Covid19, Death, Divorce, Dying, Fear, Forgiveness, Hate, Healing, Hope, Horses, Life, Loneliness, Longing, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, politics, Self, Soul, Soul Poetry, Souls, Spokane, Women's Poems, Yearning
In this season, of triple digit days,
Anger gives way. It withers.
I said, I’m argued out about living,
What it means to be free, and human.
She is right, after all, I’m not an expert.
What do I know about a virus,
Which isn’t informed by the trees,
or clouds, or the way a horse sounds
when it calls to me in the dark?
I can only speak of the heart,
and even that, with authority of one,
my own heart, and how it breaks
To see the growing cries for help. Hate,
A distant thrum, beating, what it means
To be hurt, and hurt back harder.
Is any of this new? Or unique?
But we sought each other anyway,
To stake claim on our opinions;
The lost way, of friendship and loving,
Something which came easy to us, once,
When we valued living over living,
A life we could touch with our hands,
sending our fingers deep into the dark soil;
To be truly clean meant dirt under our nails,
For weeks, for months, dirt under our nails.
28 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Courage, Death, Divorce, Forgiveness, Happiness, Hope, Infinite, Life, Love, Love Poems, Marriage, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Survival, Vows
New eyes, your eyes,
not their eyes, you see
yourself anew, beginning
to love again. How can that be
a bad thing? Love is not bad,
ever. Make it worth it,
she said, and she’s dead now.
If she’s right, you thought,
could it save us? A love—
worth it, worthy of—
holding past what we thought
it was, what they thought
it was, to what love is:
mostly forgiveness,
he said it, I’m sure,
in the vows. Forgiveness,
he went on & on
about grace, & letting go.
27 Saturday Jul 2019
Posted in Poetry
And now I wonder,
if one can be too intent
on loving another,
hold too tight
the thing it can’t lose,
then lose it.
Did this truth come
too late for us,
my once held,
or were we always
destined to let go,
and drop our love,
like stones,
into the dark well
of undoing?
24 Monday Jun 2019
Tags
Childhood, Children, Divorce, Forgiveness, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Survival, Surviving, Trauma, Violence
What is the opposite
of the violence
you witnessed,
hostages to our pain,
too young to know
what normal should be?
But tonight,
all three grown,
and at my side,
the peace
of survivors who love
and forgive–
because what else is there
except to love
and forgive.
18 Saturday May 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Bird Poem, Bird Poems, Bird Poetry, Birds, Death, Divorce, Eternity, Forgiveness, Freedom, Grace, Gratitude, Happiness, Hope, Infinite, Life, Longing, Love, Love Poems, Mercy, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Rain, Sacred, Soul, Soul Poetry, Souls, Spirit, Spirits, Spring, spring poem, Starting Over, Survival, The Universe, Unity, Women's Poems, Yearning
Even the stars are made of this:
sunshine & sweet petrichor.
What comes from above,
and we are made right,
our thirst, our life—
forgiveness,
after years of anger;
we finally feel love again.
The earth wreaks well of redemption,
grace permeates the dry ground.
And, the only sound we hear now,
birds,
who sing of starting over,
or, at least that’s what we hear,
like the smell of fresh water,
among grass, and clover:
sunshine & sweet petrichor.
16 Tuesday Apr 2019
Posted in Poetry
08 Monday Apr 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
aspen, Divorce, Hope, Loss, Love, Masochist, Metaphor, Pain, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Survival, Violence
I searched metaphors to describe you,
the aspen’s branches beating against themselves,
waving for help, like desperate arms,
but that was the work of the wind.
The coyote, who devoured all except the head,
and what appeared to be a shoulder
of our girl cat, and left her among the weeds,
but that was the work of hunger.
Then I thought, maybe the foal,
when they drove off with his mother,
her whinnying, more distant and more distant,
as he crushed his tender body against the rails,
but that was the work of love being torn away.
No, in the end, I came up empty explaining
your helplessness against self-loathing,
our loss of hope, and leaving,
but that, it seems now, was the work of surviving–
surviving the things even poems can’t explain.
04 Friday Jan 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Divorce, Forgiveness, Freedom, Life, Love, Memory, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Self, The Universe, Truth
“It isn’t the experience of today that drives men mad. It is the remorse for something that happened yesterday.” Bob Burdette
The tape that plays
is not always a good tape,
or an accurate replay
of what happened.
What you said,
what I said,
over thirteen years,
a million things.
No, an infinity
of words and actions
that speak louder
than words, truer
than our memories
of one another.
I told you,
when I finally leave,
it will be forever,
and I think you believed me.
If I could do over
I would do the same,
and wish you would.
No part changed.
No person gone.
No person, gone,
brought back.
Remorse? I want to say,
No. I want to say
this unplanned chaos
is part of a plan.
I want to look back,
someday, and say,
This is what I wanted,
where I wanted to be.
28 Friday Dec 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
An amicable divorce is the scariest kind,
because we prefer our American ones
be macabre—on the edge of killing
without actually killing—
like, she tried to run him over,
but she also tried to miss—
and it all worked out, because
he married his lover,
she married hers,
and each say they’re happy.
Brian told me—
Sometimes, divorce is a mercy —
and just like that
the church granted his annulment.
Gibbons, wolves, french angelfish,
shingleback skinks:
monogamous for life.
Even the seahorse,
whose males carry the young,
and sandhill cranes
with their unison calls,
commit to each other
and never look back.
Yet, tell me what the seahorse
was asked to forgive:
a lie, an indiscretion,
a we don’t love each other anymore?
I literally woke and found you gone;
twenty years later,
I still don’t miss you.
09 Friday Mar 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
adventure, breakups, Divorce, Dreams, finding yourself, Life, Love, Poem, Poems, Poems About Kids, Poetry, sons
You always flew on wings
adrift of sky and dreams,
A journey to find–
What was it you said?
It’s not enough to be alive,
If you don’t feel alive.
Yes, that was it.
So we watched you leave,
As the sun struggled
To get clear of the clouds,
At least, those were the lines
In the poem I wrote then.
But all I remember now
Is your back–
And how you didn’t turn
To wave goodbye.
09 Friday Mar 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
1
There are people we meet
Who are old;
They get older.
Her green house,
our gray house,
separated by a few feet
And a porous shrub.
The black and white manx
Meandered between her yard,
with its ancient birch,
glorious hydrangeas,
And ours,
with its withering grass.
26 Wednesday Apr 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
1.
Under the wings of Canada Geese,
Rushed time:
Moments we wept
In our loss,
Wept in our fear,
Abandoned each other.
I stood alone,
Amid an ocean of dry leaves,
As the sky flew by in freedom,
And helplessness.
2.
How can I forget
That great yellow butterfly,
As big as a barn swallow?
It hovered around you,
Like a message
You wouldn’t hear.
Finally, it landed on your bare shoulder,
As you stopped work,
Leaned against your shovel,
Encircled of frail spirit,
And our children,
Chasing, laughing around you.
While I, woman in flight,
Watched silently from the back door,
Knowing I was letting you go.
Bits of Poetry 