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.
04 Tuesday Jun 2019
Posted in Poetry
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.
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.
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Birth, Brook, Children, Courage, Fear of Death, First Born, Freedom, Gratitude, Happiness, Hope, Life, Love, Mothers, New Soul, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Son, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Spirits, Strength, Yearning
Some, come into the world as old souls,
like they’ve been here a hundred times,
a bit weary, wise, or jaded, made cautious
by pain & an understanding of human hearts.
But not my son, whose eyes saw the earth
as if he, and it, were just created.
Yes, from first breath he was a wanderer,
like his father in his lust for the world,
possibilities stretched out before him,
no person stranger, no place strange,
a modern day viking making his way
across an infinite, angry sea, with no map.
Unless, music is a map. Song after song,
his heart in waves of hard-plucked strings.
He sang loud, and I wondered how
he could pour himself out in front of crowds.
I see him, even now, upon the ocean,
his wooden ship, the waves, the sails.
09 Tuesday Apr 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Death, Humanity, Letting Go, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Memory, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacred, Survival, Surviving
We are veterans of dead bones,
products of love, and its loss,
memorizers of last breaths,
and what letting go feels like.
The front line of memory gives way,
what we held in our hands,
dissolves, like water on clay–
muddy water, returning
to muddy ground, then dust;
it is a fate that awaits all of us:
empty arms, encircled of sacred air,
grasping at remnants
of what we valued there.
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.
02 Tuesday Apr 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Canada Geese, Cowboy, Freedom, Hope, Horse, Horse Poem, Horse Poems, Horse poetry, Horses, Life, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Ravens, River, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Spirits, Spokane, Spokane River, Spring, Survival
We rode dirt and mud,
through standing water,
like ponds, to verify
the sun, and life
of returning things:
Canada Geese, wood ravens,
mule deer, grazing at dusk,
and the river, surging
with the spring run off
of our souls, singing.
29 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
aspen, Aspen Trees, Beauty, Courage, Death Poems, Dying, Hope, Life, Love, Love Poems, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Spirit, Spring, spring poem, Survival, Women's Poems, Yearning
early spring,
a cold aspen, clothed
in soft buds, robed in white,
like ash, born of snow;
to touch her is to quake
with the anticipation
of a thousand leaves
desperate to unfold;
a thousand leaves
desperate
to unfold you.
19 Tuesday Mar 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Loneliness, Longing, Love, Love Poems, Need, Passion, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Souls, Spirits, Yearning
Need,
like a bliss of birds
who flow, spring to spring,
synchronized of sun and moon,
and wing of wing.
Love is best a mutual thing:
selfish, blind, and binding trust,
passion, that crushes
bones to must.
11 Monday Mar 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Aging, Cancer, Death, Death Poems, Dying, Fear of Death, Foal, Hope, Horses, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry
My father is eighty,
has cancer,
lives two hours away,
and I worry—
could I get there
soon enough to say
I love him,
should his last moments
come quick, unexpected—
like a foal born in the night
while I’m sleeping,
even though I’d been there
to catch him all day.
08 Friday Mar 2019
Posted in Poetry
And there you lay,
on the hospital bed,
your long, liquid self,
blond tendrils–
even in dying
you were beautiful.
And your baby girl,
left behind,
forever suspended
in the golden
syrup of your soul
poured out—
frozen,
fossilized.
04 Monday Mar 2019
Posted in Poetry
for my brother, Danny, on his birthday
Have we improvised too much,
lost sight of our true selves, surviving;
the world is a tough audience.
And now I remember,
when you said you wanted to be a candle,
and we laughed until we cried, and cried,
then we’d ask you again,
and again, laugh and cry,
strange, how life, with time, has changed,
and I think it’s worth a try
to be a candle.
What better man to be a light,
than one who brightens,
and who thought being a candle
was possible, and right?
03 Sunday Mar 2019
Posted in Poetry
02 Saturday Mar 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Afterlife, Bernie, Chimes, Death, Hope, Loss, Love, micropoetry, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Spirit, Wind
He’s been dead for four years,
but I have his chimes,
and time, like wind, passes
over their wrought iron curves,
nudging the striker,
and making its voice to sing,
ring and rise up
like message from a grave,
or another sphere,
or a person I loved,
sitting next to me, speaking.
#micropoetry
17 Sunday Feb 2019
Posted in Poetry
09 Saturday Feb 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Aging, Azaleas, Children, Death, Flowers, hydrangeas, Life, Lilies, Love, Memory, Mothers, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Winter, Winter poem
Winter returned, unbroken,
and I bought azaleas, hydrangeas
and stems of lilies
to stand against white windows.
How like memories,
these flowers in winter:
smiles, laughter, love,
eyes, cheeks, toes, and fingers.
Mama, mama, mama,
I hear them calling,
as I cut their stems.
05 Tuesday Feb 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Begonias, Childhood, Death, Hope, Life, Loss, Love, Magnolias, Memorial Day, Memory, Poem, Poems, Poetry
I said magnolias,
you said, peonies,
how you remember her hands
tending them, day after day.
I imagine a grandmother’s hands
reaching into a profusion of blooms,
wrinkled and wise and tender;
it’s a good place
for the mind to wander.
Memorial Day.
You were so young,
and your brothers, one older,
one younger, even than you,
would cut the luscious stems,
and place them in a wagon
alongside empty pickle jars,
mayonnaise and jelly jars.
The cemetery.
You’d sell your bouquets
for fifty cents,
three big blooms to a jar.
What a memory,
and I imagined families
pulling up in lonely cars.
It’s the sixties,
and there are waves of Chevy sedans
with heavy doors,
hoods, stretched out in lines,
like plots.
We sold them all, you said.
And I’m not surprised:
regret in empty hands,
is no small thing,
as they walk toward their loss,
tombstones, which remind them
of loss,
of lack.
And then, the relief
when they can fill those hands
with the heft and smooth skin
of a glass jar filled with water,
and a few fleshy blooms.
27 Sunday Jan 2019
Posted in Poetry
My love of him will crush me
to dust, bone against bone
of my heart bones.
He’s gone away,
and gone is a crushing
must of memory, sweet
sweet smile of eyes.
You see, disparity’s the fall,
the disparity of everything,
and nothing at all.
13 Sunday Jan 2019
Posted in Poetry
Tags
Authenticity, Brew, Goddess, Life, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Real, Strength, Truth, Witch, Woman
A good witch, I think, as her voice rises
in story: their affair, his testosterone levels,
her childhood, and its want of love,
the gratitude for her lover’s love.
She seems about six foot two,
jaw etched of marble,
arms of steel, hands of iron,
and she fills the air around us
with tremor, something ominous,
yet vulnerable, as if she is saying,
I’ll tell you my secrets, like this gift of oil.
I take it, of course, I take it,
unscrew the top of the repurposed
wine bottle, smell deeply the lavender
and the garlic, her special brew.
I will tell you how I made it, she says,
because she holds no detail back.
She is the woman you’ve heard about,
or seen in movies, the one
who doesn’t give two shits,
the one who walks into a room
and steals it, and fills it
with laughter, and warning.
The woman whose tremor speaks
and says two things: come closer,
and I will tell you of love, of loss,
of picking oneself back up,
while at the same time you hear,
if you betray me, I will kill you.
And it all seems perfectly normal,
like the moment you always knew,
now unfolding. How what’s inside of you
was already unloosed in this goddess
of olive oil brewery, truth-teller,
all eyes on her, a wild, dangerous
animal uncaged, everyone nervous,
and eager to see what she will do.
Bits of Poetry 