24 Saturday Jul 2021
Posted in Poetry
The universe told me
Our hands are empty,
They do not contain miracles
Or, even wise words.
Moment by moment,
Only moments,
The brokenness of hearts,
A temporary rise to our feet,
As if to help,
but we didn’t–Did we?
Because our hands are empty.
13 Sunday Jun 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Belief, Death, Death Poems, drought, Dying, God, Heat, Hope, Horse Poem, Horse Poems, Horse poetry, Horses, Life, Loss, Love, Miracles, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Prayer, Sacred, Sun, Survival, weeds
Drought year,
Everything is dying early.
We realize what is hearty,
And what is not.
Weeds, they multiply,
Even after we spray,
As if they know,
This is their time.
They sink taproots,
And suckle what is left
Of underground aquifers.
We’re breaking heat records in June;
The sweltering, unrelenting sun
Is just getting started.
How many trips to the barn,
Down this cackling road?
The day I saw the barn cat
Kill father Robin–
It was an ominous sign
For the foal.
And then I succumbed
To this hackling cough.
Death is a time for prayer,
Calling out
for whatever hope God can spare.
Cries sent, not into a dark night,
But a hideous brightness.
13 Sunday Jun 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Death, Death Poems, Dying, Fear, Fear of Death, Hope, Horses, Life, Loss, Love, Miracles, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Prayer, Souls, Survival, Yearning
When death gets a foothold,
You don’t know who it will take.
Souls grow heavy with guilt,
And the weight of silence.
Hope, a fragile light;
It fuels us.
Small, but mighty.
We wait for miracles;
They are fickle things,
Miracles.
05 Saturday Jun 2021
Posted in Poetry
The virtue of aspen:
quake of leaves
in soft wind;
you see one tree,
friend,
look beneath,
it’s a family,
a colony
of roots and starts,
a community of rattling souls.
I imagine, if one is cut,
all else will shudder.
04 Friday Jun 2021
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Courage, Crows, Forgiveness, Hope, Horse poetry, Love, Love Poems, Mercy, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Ravens, Truth, Unity
We don’t understand what the birds say,
Or, the horses, who nicker and neigh.
The raven sounds far away, a message,
We think, a harbinger of what will come,
On this path today. A fellow traveler?
A moose, a deer, we can’t know,
But we try to know.
Yet, people cry out to us in real words,
We thought we knew: Black Lives Matter,
Isn’t that true? Isn’t it a simple thing
to say, but you insist it’s wrong:
All lives matter. They do.
But which of us is hurting now, friend?
Which of us feels our lives might end,
Or, be judged for the color of our skin?
Why can’t our words be simple again,
and our hearts open, to a better beginning?
24 Saturday Apr 2021
Tags
Children, Courage, Death, Family, Forgiveness, Generations, Hope, Life, Love, Marriage, Mothers, New Collection, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Strength, Survival, Women's Poems, Yearning
It’s a wonder I’m here, progeny of lost souls,
orphans, abandoned wives, poverty & places
so uninhabitable, unsustainable—
Yet, I’m here, and the generations beyond me
refuse to wither, too.
When the earth begins to close,
there’s always just enough left
to sustain us. One small patch of grass,
free of weeds, or drought,
and just enough blue sky and sun.
We find that place, and stay long enough
to drag another survivor on.
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.
15 Thursday Oct 2020
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Bird Poem, Bird Poems, CoronaVirus, Courage, Covid19, Death, Dying, Forgiveness, Hope, Infinite, Life, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Spirit, Spring, Survival
“There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.” Robert Frost
Yet, they do fall, and silent, rot
beneath the changing bow.
Birds gather to peck the flesh
making less of loss,
Or perhaps, no loss at all.
You see,
the Universe claims everything
we leave behind.
Our regrets, too,
like spoiled fruit,
eventually fall away
scavenged by the sun.
Seeds are revealed
inside what we took as dead.
Trust me, next spring
there will be a new start.
12 Monday Oct 2020
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Alone, Chaos, CoronaVirus, Courage, Covid19, Death, Hope, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Spokane, Survival, Yearning
“The hope is that if you live through it, there will be art on the other side.” (Louise Glück)
Two hundred and twenty days,
the sun and sky, still uncaged,
yet, our lives, like flotsam,
float further and further away
from what we knew:
The Fox Theatre sits empty.
And my friend,
how we’ve drifted apart,
you, on your wreckage,
me, on mine, further and further
from the place. Our lives hit
that large rock. The ship
is lost, lost, lost.
Will someone find us,
and salvage what is left?
What is left?
10 Saturday Oct 2020
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Canada Geese, Canadian Geese, Love, Love Poems, Lovers, Memory, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Spokane River
The final chapter is full of thank yous,
breathing in the mystery of Canada Geese,
whose wings pierce the ravine, the V of it,
gliding inches above the Spokane River–
remind me, I say, remind me; I never want to forget,
and inhale deeply, as if I could take that feeling
into my soul-bones, my image keeper–
a fragile place, for sure, always in need
of being reminded by those who felt it, too.
He told me, you will remember the old things best,
the very old memories, you want to forget.
I say:
We appreciate too late,
the most beautiful things.
It’s sad to think I’ll remember
the one who didn’t love me,
rather than the one holding me now,
holding this memory of the geese.
I think I will write a poem to keep it,
to remind me of what it is to fly,
to love, to pause for a moment
and try to inhale this feeling.
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.
29 Monday Jun 2020
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.
06 Monday Apr 2020
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Bird Poems, CoronaVirus, Covid19, Death, Dying, Forgiveness, Gratitude, Happiness, Hope, Horse Poems, Horse poetry, Horses, Life, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacred, Soul, Soul Poetry, Spirit, Spring, spring poem, Survival, This Pendant World, Yearning
2.
Today, I trusted you,
straddled your wide,
bare back,
sweet mare,
doe-eyed, and healthy.
We breathed together
what good there is
of this April day,
and offered thanks
to a world,
mostly untouched:
the mountain, still there,
the grass, still starting to green,
the birds, still returning,
singing their songs
into the dark hours
of the night.
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.
07 Saturday Dec 2019
Posted in Poetry
The lasting sting of salt,
zero point three milligrams
per tear,
yet, still they drop,
tapped into an ocean
where I swim,
like a child,
through the salty grief
of letting go.
She’s gone
with the quiet rains,
too gentle
to wash away the grief
of my empty hands.
Even now, I know
I’ll look back and wonder
why it was so hard
to let go.
Time will blunt
emotion, stunt
the onslaught of memory,
the true knowing
of what was lost,
now, so fresh,
but soon distant,
as gone becomes gone,
and life,
unable to stop,
moves on.
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?
21 Sunday Jul 2019
Posted in Poetry
I like to think
it was some great,
cosmic,
gravitational pull,
two spirits,
in proximity,
drawn closer,
meant to be
together.
I mean,
why
this one,
not
that one?
You can feel
the magnetic draw
between two
celestial bodies;
what is that,
if not destiny?
20 Saturday Jul 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Gratitude, Love, Love Poems, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Thankfulness, world
Everyday, I would write a poem,
as if it’s my last poem,
a last letter to a world I love,
love, and hope it means something
to say so, even as I know
it means different to different–
what does it mean,
I hear the world asking,
imploring me to offer proof.
But you’ll have to take me at my word.
A poem a day, a song,
fingers along a rosary,
giving thanks at each bead,
and never running out
of things to be thankful for.
Bead, to bead, to bead:
the sun, the stars, the grass,
rain,
blessings and blessings,
love,
yes, love–
I don’t have to tell you,
or prove it;
you know what it is.
I hope
you know what it is.
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.
21 Friday Jun 2019
Tags
clouds, Death, embrace, Flowers, Happiness, Hope, Life, Love, Love Poems, Manito Park, Petunias, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul Poetry, Souls, Spokane, summer
I’m writing today in response to a prompt about clouds that I found on the Manic Sylph’s blog.
My fifty-second first day of summer,
is cool and cloudy, the way I like my days,
a high of seventy, and I’ll stroll Manito Park,
while the flowers reprieve from scorchers,
and chaos; mild days are undervalued
in this world, everyone wants to run hot;
can I just sit here and dead-head my petunias
until I die of natural causes, hopefully,
in my sleep, when I’m past my eightieth
first day of summer, or ninetieth—
however old it is when I’m ready to go.
Are we ever ready to leave days like this?
There is always someone left to love,
to smile at, to hold in our just right embrace
while the sun comes up in their souls,
and they, too, long to celebrate
their first cloudy days of summer.
