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Bits of Poetry

~ Linda R Davis, Raven of Peace & Poetry

Bits of Poetry

Tag Archives: Soul

On Love and a Prayer

24 Tuesday Jan 2023

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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Tags

Addiction, Death, drug addiction, Dying, Hope, Life, Loss, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Souls, Survival, Yearning

I see him in every empty stare

A zombified generation

Of once beautiful souls

How did we get it so wrong

Sacrifice a generation

And how do we save them?

Love isn’t enough

When it has gone this bad,

So far from our empty promises

Is he beyond prayers, too

Because that’s all I have left

I see him in every empty stare

And send up this poem

On the fragile wings of love,

and a whispered prayer.

Bent On Flying

26 Saturday Nov 2022

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Beauty, Courage, Dancing, Freedom, Gratitude, Happiness, Hope, Longing, Love, Love Poems, Music, Poem, Poems, Poetry, shame, Songs, Soul, Soul Poetry, Souls, Spirit, Spirits, Strength, Survival, Unity, Yearning

Fogged in for five days,

A space, made smaller

By low-hanging clouds

That won’t go away.

Nothing is as ungovernable

As weather, except the soul,

Bent on flying–

It’s what they always get wrong

About need; I need freedom;

I need sun, and a view so clear

It extends forever, like a soul,

Bent on flying–

Beyond every cage, open space;

Beyond every wall, more room;

Beyond this fog, the sun,

So bright, it will blind you.

2

He said, the world is bound together

in shame, and shadow.

3

What serves your soul:

A walk, a song, an embrace.

Last summer, we danced

Under stars and moon,

To music from Alexa.

Last night, we danced

To Christmas jazz.

You opened the door,

Danced barefoot in snow,

Twirled under night clouds,

A free soul of sun, and song,

A soul bent on flying.

Winter Blind

24 Thursday Nov 2022

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Afterlife, Alone, Death, Death Poems, Eternity, Heaven, Hope, Ice, Infinite, Life, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Memory, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacred, Snow, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Spirits, The Universe, Winter, Winter poem

A white blanket was pulled over

Our homes, the earth, our heads,

As effortless as sliding on ice,

As uncontrollable as dying.

And, it was hard to see beginnings

Of fields, or endings of hilltops;

In that way, it was a blur of (also white) fog.

Who’s to say what lay behind it?

The infinite forever of lost souls–?

Just there, and there, look where

My finger is pointing, beyond the trees.

I see myself only as far as the fence-line.

All else sparkles back, a vision

Of what is here, and what has been here,

Always within the margin

Of what we can so easily see.

Her Arms

14 Monday Nov 2022

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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Tags

aspen, chickadee, Death, Death Poems, Ezra Pound, Falcon, Hope, Life, Loneliness, Loss, Love, magpie, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Pound, Robins, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Survival, Yearning

I will take a *Pound out of this poem everyday until it is three lines: a title, and 2 lines.

I envy the Aspen,

With her sleek, white body,

She stands unmoved,

While her leaves shake,

Turn color, fall,

And she is left,

Naked and alone,

In wind, rain, snow,

Enduring all,

Judging none,

No complaining.

In spring, I remember

Her limbs rejoiced

In buds, then leaves,

And birds.

They gathered

In her arms:

Robin, magpie,

Sparrow, finch, falcon.

This autumn was summer,

Then winter,

She is bare again.

The chickadees bounce

From perch to perch,

Fully happy in her embrace.

During this too early winter,

When we lose faith,

Fall to our knees,

Barely endure

dark day after dark day;

She stands reaching,

Arms outstretched to the sun

Beyond the clouds.

You must see now,

Why I envy the Aspen,

How she will survive,

And thrive, beyond me.

Love Letters

04 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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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.

Confession

01 Monday Aug 2022

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Addiction, Chaos, Confession, Death, Death Poems, Divorce, Dying, Eternity, Family, Forgiveness, Infinite, Loneliness, Loss, Love, mourning, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Soul, Souls, Survival

I tripped;

it fell,

flew,

from my arms;

then,

there was a funeral.

Knowing : the Other Side of Losing

30 Saturday Jul 2022

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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

Some Gifts

29 Friday Jul 2022

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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.

How We Keep It

23 Monday May 2022

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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.

One Swan, One Last Kiss of a Bee

12 Thursday May 2022

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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.

Dimensions Around Us, Heaven

14 Monday Mar 2022

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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.

Toward Our Once Bright Existence

03 Thursday Feb 2022

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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.

The Edges Begin to Blur

02 Sunday Jan 2022

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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.

Song of Sorrow and Joy: 4

11 Saturday Dec 2021

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Tags

Death, Death Poems, Dying, Family, Forgiveness, Life, Love, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Song of Sorrow and Joy, Soul, Souls, Spirit, Yearning

IV

Sit, and let me sing you a song,

Of our perfection,

And our imperfections:

No species sucks so bad

At getting what we want—

I’ll title it, Love.

Realization must come

Too late, or it’s not human.

Only in losing do we understand

The full measure of what we had,

Basically, chances, and with chance,

The opportunity to grasp —

It—

And I’m back to the title of the song—

Love,

And how we suck at it.

Song of Sorrow and Joy: 3

11 Saturday Dec 2021

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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.

Song of Sorrow and Joy: 2

11 Saturday Dec 2021

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Tags

Death, Death Poems, Dying, Family, Fathers, Fear of Death, Forgiveness, Happiness, Infinite, Love, Memory, Parents, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Song of Sorrow and Joy, Soul, Souls, Spirit

II.

I’ve seen enough of spirit to know

that you’ll still be here

when I write of letting go.

How love becomes energy,

And energy can’t be destroyed.

The power of memory:

Imperfections, fade away,

Only Love remains,

As a steady anchor,

A steady hand through—

It’s been a while

since I’ve seen you laugh,

(There’s not much joy in dying,)

Yet, I remember your laughter, too,

Your tears wiped away from crying.

And it makes me smile now,

How we watched you break down,

Such a serious father,

Completely undone

By your laughter.

Song of Sorrow and Joy

10 Friday Dec 2021

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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.

A Low Barrier Between Life and Death

23 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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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?

Hope We’ll Live Through It

12 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by Linda R Davis Poetry in Poetry

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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?

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

02 Sunday Aug 2020

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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.

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Recent Posts

  • On Love and a Prayer
  • The Promise of Protection
  • Bent On Flying
  • Winter Blind
  • I Envy the Aspen’s Sleek Body

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