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~ Linda R Davis, Raven of Peace & Poetry

Bits of Poetry

Tag Archives: Healing

What Was Lost in the Trade

15 Sunday May 2022

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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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.

The Knowing Alone

01 Friday Apr 2022

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

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?

Diminished, But Singing

04 Tuesday Jan 2022

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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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.

Lost Child New Year

31 Friday Dec 2021

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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Tags

Belief, Christmas, Healing, Hope, Longing, New Year, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Yearning

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?

A Low Barrier Between Life and Death

23 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ash, Beauty, Bird Poems, Bowl and Pitcher, Courage, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Fear of Death, Healing, Hope, Life, Moss, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Ponderosa, River, Soul, Souls, Spokane, Spokane River, Strength, Suicide, Survival, Winter, Winter poem, Yearning

I wonder how many have plunged,

broken bodies against the steep,

unforgiving basalt, to flow far away

from the tether of this rocky outcrop.

There are worse places to die

than underneath a basking ponderosa,

on a glorious day in deep winter,

high, above the earth’s mucosa.

Here is heaven, its gods, the osprey and eagle;

they preside from piney thrones, regal,

and survey with indifferent contemplation;

from their perch, suffering is also celebration.

There are less noble ways to die,

than beneath the wings of geese.

See them glide peacefully

over the rapids of the Spokane,

rage of water in the ears,

shiver of blue sky, full sun.

Yet, if hopeless traveler made the steep climb

to this one, celestial throne:

its blood, a brilliant green moss,

its body, the bare, leafless skeleton of alumroot,

entreating with outstretched arms:

See, the promise of spring.

If they were to navigate loose rock,

on the treacherous path that leads here,

would it be enough to make them cling

to the rock wall in front of me,

this low, precarious barrier between?

Let Life Rhyme Again

13 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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Tags

Chaos, CoronaVirus, Covid19, Healing, Hope, Life, Loneliness, Loss, pandemic, Poem, Poems, Poetry, spike protein, Survival, vaccine

I lost my desire to rhyme

about the same time

plexiglass invaded our stores

and pimply clerks ordered

me to click the bleached pads

of dollars, exchanged for goods–

shoppers, too long locked up

and lonely, a kind of death usurped

a joy, usually reserved for spring,

and retuning things,

but the unknown lacks name,

and there’s no map through,

our hearts were confused

and there were no rhymes,

and no rhythm, because time

ceased to be the count count

of seconds, minutes, hours–

Remember, I said it,

it’s unknown, the future bits,

wrinkled, in those deep wrinkles

a hot iron can’t unwrinkle–

so we resigned ourselves

to the sloppiness of prose,

in uneven meter,

I mean, me,

I resigned myself to getting by,

and now I’m on the other side,

of a vaccine,

MRNA with a spike protein,

and I say inject it in these veins,

so I may return to living again,

a life, with enjambed rhymes,

with slant rhymes, NO, a life

with hard rhymes,

like strife,

and knife,

and happiness.

Our Once Shared Existence of Earth, and How the Virus Undid Us

02 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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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.

That Day the World Promised to Heal Me

29 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alone, CoronaVirus, Covid19, Death, Division, Grace, Gratitude, Healing, Hope, Huckleberries, Life, Loneliness, Love, Mercy, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacred, Souls, Strength, Survival, Wilderness

And then the world said,

I will heal you

In ferns, unfurling again,

berries, growing ripe

On the bows of yesterday,

the ones your hands touched,

As you harvested the wild fruit.

This is my great forest of chatter,

it says, in a smattering of late flowers,

a fragrant, maskless breeze,

and trees you can touch with bare hands.

Speak to the sky, it cajoles,

And the sky will answer you back,

With its bold booms, and its wet clouds,

none of this needs viewed

from behind the doom of plexiglass.

The young clerk, who looked down,

and down, and down, faceless,

behind the many layers of protection.

He was humankind, afraid to look up,

afraid to touch, or speak,

or even see one another.

But the world said,

I remain the same, fully open to you.

See me, and I will heal you.

When She Was Young: Song of the Lotus

04 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Addiction, Daughters, Flowers, Healing, Hope, Loss, Lotus, Love, Mother Poems, Mothers, Odyssey, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Promises

“The lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them.”
The Odyssey Book IX

Promises, she heard them all,
the call of her mother’s voice,
she wanted to believe:
This won’t happen again, baby.
Maybe, it was okay to trust
for a while, and rise, like a lotus blossom,
above the mud of her addiction,
floating with petals stretched up to the sun.
Somewhere, she thought,
there is a story of a girl whose love could cure,
and pour itself out as an ethereal blanket,
so magical, together at last,
even their bones would long
to float away in the lotus’ song.

Conversations With Maggie 6

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Anxiety, Compassion, Conversations With Maggie, Faith, Fear, Healing, Love, Love Poems, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacrifice, Sacrificial Love

Fear rises up inside us, she said,

But love can go clear to the bone;

Take it as close as you can, without breaking. 

Maybe it’s okay to break, I said,

After all, a bone will always yearn to heal.

A Brew Of Buds

25 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Uncategorized

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Tags

aspen, Aspen Buds, Aspen Trees, Balm of Gilead, Healing, Olive oil, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Poplar Buds, poplar trees, Spring, Toads

We acclimate to early spring,

Wind, rain, and fifty degrees,

Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor,

Because the world is opening to us,

Like the gentlest of heavens.

Poplar buds, sticky with resin,

Ready to be picked from their branches,

Mixed, and set aside to ferment in oil.

A balm for brokenness:

Stir together early spring toad-sound,

Coming to us from a darkened pasture

Where it overflowed with melted snow

And rain, a pair of killdeer nesting

Out by the north fence among the dry grasses,

And the aspen, still bare, but breaking in buds.

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Death Death Poems Dying Hope Horses Life Loss Love Poem Poems Poetry Soul Souls Spirit Survival Yearning

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