21 Sunday Aug 2022
Posted in Poetry
Forever and ever,
They have underestimated
Women.
Elizabeth
Would not be queen.
Born to a whore.
(They define whores.)
Do you see the difference?
The threat?
Does a man scare you the same way,
As a woman with a feline sway?
No, it is a woman
who brought down Troy,
And toys with the heart in you.
Have you seen a heart?
Not the one you scribble
In pen,
But the ripped out organ,
Still beating blood
Into your hands.
11 Thursday Aug 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Cats, Death, Death Poems, Feral Cats, Freedom, Hope, Life, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Souls, Survival, weeds, Yearning
when she hid
behind the grasses
and weeds
you could only see
her eyes
but you had to be looking
all I want
is to exist
on this earth
I could hear
those words
I swear
I could hear her
say them
04 Thursday Aug 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Death, Death Poems, Fathers, Forgiveness, Hope, Letters, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Love Letters, Love Poems, Lovers, Memory, Mothers, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Survival
Whisper me a tale of lovers,
Through limbs of trees and years,
Rattle a leaf, turn a page,
Rifle through an abandoned dresser.
You will find them there among socks,
With no feet left to cover.
The body is taken away,
Yet, rises again in pen.
She recognizes the scrawl,
It is as much him as him,
And hymn to her hurting heart.
You realize love too late,
She thinks, beyond the day-to-day
Bicker and fuss, we lost us-–
She sees her lover now,
In what is left undone–
The many things he touched
And with his touch, flourished,
They wilt now that he’s gone.
Yet, in her hands,
She holds his scribbled words:
Nineteen sixty three, nineteen sixty four–
And, it all comes back to her.
01 Monday Aug 2022
Posted in Poetry
30 Saturday Jul 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Alone, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Eternity, Fathers, Infinite, Life, Loneliness, Longing, Losing, Loss, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Regret, Soul, Souls, Yearning
oh, they are right
with their cliches and memes
about how you will regret
when they’re gone
the missed opportunities
to hold them
to ask them
to listen
yes, it is obvious
isn’t it
but you are doomed
like I was
to never fully understand
the precious lives
so goddam important
to your own
so ubiquitous of shared moments
it is impossible to appreciate
their value
yes, it’s true
you’ll only know on the other side
of losing
welcome to being human
you will find it is full
of regrets
29 Friday Jul 2022
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Dad, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Eternity, Fathers, Hope, Infinite, Life, Loss, Love, Love Poems, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Survival, wolfhound, Wolfhounds
Some gifts are better than others,
The way I saw your heart extend
Into past memories of her—
Tears from your uncrying eyes—
Her loss was the one loss
That broke you like that,
Like that,
The sobbing unashamed.
And then, it’s as if we fast forward
The great movie of our lives together:
You’re dying,
I’m a middle-aged woman.
You give me a dog.
A wolfhound,
Like the one whose loss broke you
Way back then. Riagan. Riagan.
Whose eyes held our gaze,
Whose eyes sought to impart wisdom;
Perhaps, her eyes saw beyond this life,
To where you are now.
Wouldn’t it be something
If our lives are that special,
They continue forever,
Two points–three–an infinity of dots
On some great line that extends forever.
24 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in Poetry
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
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.
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.
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.
01 Friday Apr 2022
Posted in Poetry
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?
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.
13 Sunday Mar 2022
Posted in Poetry
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.
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.
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.
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.
12 Sunday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
11 Saturday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Children, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Forgiveness, Grace, Life, Longing, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Song of Sorrow and Joy, Soul, Souls, Spirit
III
And now, I pause
at the feet of your memory:
Your laughter,
before there was nothing
To laugh about,
Your strength,
Your fatal optimism in your strength.
I’ve learned,
Being a rock, a steady hand
Wasn’t always conducive
To being a full man.
And there is the regret,
(Mine, not yours),
But it’s too late for regrets.
We are who we are,
And so little escapes that reality;
What forms us,
Forms all others, formed me.
Sometimes, we are left to weep
at what could have been:
We could have called,
We could have written,
We could have cherished,
The moments we came
Wanting to be cherished.
I misspoke,
When I said imperfections fade away–
They don’t,
But there is no anger,
Only a dull futility:
The reality that is, versus
What we hoped it would be.
10 Friday Dec 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Death, Death Poems, Dying, Eternity, Family, Fear of Death, Forgiveness, Life, Loss, Love, Love Poems, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacred, Song of Sorrow and Joy, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Yearning
“Once I heard a song of sweetness,
As it cleft the morning air,
Sounding in its blest completeness,
Like a tender, pleading prayer;
And I sought to find the singer,
Whence the wondrous song was borne,
And I found a bird, sore wounded,
Pinioned by a thorn.”
I.
The song of joy comes
From the same place as sorrow:
All losses bound together
With all gifts,
Wonder and tragedy,
Sifted, then mixed.
I will hurt no more, I said,
And it was as if my soul
Was dead to happiness, too.
But now I stand,
Ready to let go of you.
Bits of Poetry 