The silk of waking
To dreams yet dreamed
Linger in the sky
Adrift in gray clouds
Carrying visions of possibilities
That yet may be
Lingering
poetry
The Great Heron
I greeted the Great Heron
With a hello.
Then asked for some wisdom
Or some secrets of the earth.
But the Great Heron
Didn’t bother with a no.
Just a fluff of feathers
Before turning away
Without being troubled
To even look at me.
The red wing black birds
Chittered away in laughter
As the gentle doves
Cooed soothingly.
The crows cawed,
Rather obnoxiously,
About time running down.
I said I knew
And was aware of the beauty
In lessons along the way.
Even in the lessons so painful
You thought they might
Break your soul in two
Held a beauty in the end.
The crows disliked what I said,
And they couldn’t disagree,
So, screaming out a caw,
Flew away.
Turning his eyes to me,
The Great Heron shifted on his log,
Before opening his wings
And flying away,
Letting me know
He had nothing to say.
All Things New
Storm clouds rode in
Upon a sky soaked in sunset red.
Wildflowers bowed their heads
Down on either side
As I drove by
Smiling, thinking of all things new.
Once home, I stood in the yard,
Arms akimbo, welcoming the new—
What the storm, the wind, the rains
Would bring—
As gently as their nature could—
All things new, clean, green
With spring.
Scars of Hope
I gather hardened scars of loss and damage
Braided into keloid beauty
That are not blossoms of bitterness,
But fragrant beauties
That make me who I am.
Even the bars of your barren garden
Called love could not steal away
The essence of my hope.
Instead, the black, barrenness
within sugar syrup words
Of one never able to love
Contain no acid
To eat away
My skin of hope.
Dear Robert Frost
VJ’s Weekly Challenge: roads – One Woman’s Quest II (onewomansquest.org)
Before this moment,
All roads coalesced into one,
The present, the now.
Then,
Seeing this wall of roads,
I cannot help but ask
Where each road would have, could have
Led.
Different places, people–
Certainly, yes.
The mind swirls,
Possibilities,
A Tilt-A-Whirl—
A daughter lost?
The fetal tissue of a son not lost?
A different daughter born?
A heart not broken by cancer?
All the rewinds and fast forwards
Of a life of lived down different roads
Of different choices made along each way–
All the differences of each win and loss
And every other thing implied by this wall
And dear Robert Frost—
The choices I’ve made
Gave me this now,
This daughter,
For whom I would give my life,
Rather than trade.
First Day of May
Winds and rains came today.
I tried to follow the trail
They made.
But on this first day of May,
I was not strong enough–
To let the wind take me,
To allow pelting rain to abrade away
All my accumulated grime.
No freedom could I find
Within this day of winds and rains.
Baltimore
Pulled my anchor from this harbor
Years ago.
Yet the current pulls me back,
Some irritant speck,
Yet to yield a pearl,
In the soul,
Some rough edged
Needless need chafes away
Until confession is made
And a pilgrimage to graves
Must be paid—
There is no why to this–
This steel wrought laundry list
To be run down and checked through
A visit, a meal eaten
At the landmark restaurant,
Where new owners chiseled hieroglyphics
over a history of years when
the landmark lived across
A narrow brick paved street
And my family lived upstairs,
Erasing my mother’s sacrifice
Of bloody fetal tissue,
My fraternal twin,
On the bathroom floor there
While I hung on to be born.
But such bloody sacrifice
Doesn’t sell cheeseburgers,
Greek salads, and over easy eggs,
A fairytale of family ownership-
Sells well and makes for spots
On reality television shows.
A drive by the childhood home,
Sentimentality at its highest,
Revisit the torture chamber
It became—
A wooden yardstick and when it broke,
A metal one I had to buy to be taken
Across my back by a drunken mother
Until the skin broke open to bleed.
.
Why the drive by?
Who the hell knows?
When all I’d like to see
Is it all disappear—
Then the statue of Christ
In Hopkins Hospital lobby, a must see.
Where I stood as a teen
Confessing the darkest
Thing upon my soul—
A part of me wishing
My mother had died
In that surgery of fifteen hours
The other part thanking Jesus
she had lived.
Then the graves,
To place some flowers,
Talk a bit to the air,
Turn my soul inside out
To find it dusty and dirty again.
We can think our souls clean
Until turning them inside out—
That is where we find the grime
Of all the living done.
I visit my brothers,
The man who was my real father,
Then on to the man I thought was,
And then my mother,
The saint she was,
The monster she became.
At her grave, my soul aches the most,
Tweezing thorns left from her old rose bushes and my own,
Turning itself inside out,
Leaving all the grime and dirt behind,
Or so it feels.
Then on to visit with what is left of the living.
And though, I love the living,
There is little, so little–
To charm me into staying.
But the currents, the tides
Of some blood element,
Like an ancient memory,
Bring me back
From time to time.
This is Baltimore—
for me.
Periphery
VJ’s Weekly Challenge: peripheral – One Woman’s Quest II (onewomansquest.org)
Periphery
The whitest teeth
Of one brother’s smile.
Hair so black
The curls shine blue,
My mother’s hair
A forehead with a line
Of slicked back black hair,
My real father.
Clark Kent glasses,
The frames of the coke
Bottle bottom glasses,
My other brother.
The whisper of an accent
mingles with scent of Old Spice cologne,
the man I thought was my father–
Fleeting things—
Such imagery captured briefly
In the corner of the senses
Some strange trick of heart and mind—
The mind’s empty, missing parts perhaps
Playing the trickster
With edges of the senses,
So we think we see, hear, smell
The seeds of things we grieve.
Images of the dead
Cannot be real.
Such things as ghosts
Do not exist.
These ephemeral flashes
Of the senses share no breath,
No grace of God gives life
To them as they melt away
Before a half breath
Can be taken.
So, I stood
Still
Afraid to breathe
Afraid to blink
Or let the tears
That gathered fall
When I saw
A lion’s mane of hair
As you tilted your head back
To smile—
For six years—
I had not seen you
Felt you
At all–
Until
I stood
Gazing at Van Gogh’s
Field with Irises near Arles–
Your favorite flower—
Irises–
and art you loved—
the first time
in six years,
I feel you nearby—
I am stilled—
Until
Someone else moves
Beside me,
A distraction,
And you are gone.
But you linger with me
Like a wonderful and strong
perfume
The Struggle
Weekend Writing Prompt #206 – Restless | Sammi Cox (wordpress.com)
Restless roses
climb skyward
toward the eternal
their grace defeated
as winds thrust
them downward
toward dirt
they escape.
The World and Technicolor Youth
When colors bled into the world
Through the ice blue topaz of your eyes,
When we both dreamed dreams of kaleidoscope horizons
Blooming in colors too true to be real,
The universe grew beyond our measure
Where recall of dreams came so easily,
Happiness and joy found no reason to arm wrestle
With the stark reality of the world back then
In our younger times—
Before the world shrank
To this extra small size colored
In tones of X-ray grays
Now showing the long-healed breaks and cracks
Of ribs and jaw and clavicle
Yet in this time of a shrinking world and universe
Steeped in all hues of gray
With the amnesia of shrunken head dreams unbreakable,
The filter of your ice topaz eyes—
A small price to pay for wholeness
Of body, bone, and mind.
