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
Uncategorized
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.
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.
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.
Music of Hope
Eugi’s Weekly Prompt – Dance – April 22, 2021 – Eugi’s Causerie (amanpan.com)
My dance was escape
From the always too much vine
You are, crawling over the souls of others,
Choking them with tendrils of your love.
My dance, too strong for such tendrils,
Stepping the swirl patterns
Of aloneness,
Finds joy.
My dance, leaving colors of spring
In the wake of its rhythms,
Paints new life into me.
My dance, following no one,
Discovers love in its patterns,
Creating new steps of invitation
To be followed by my soul.
My dance, flaming and firing in warmth,
Burns away the coldness meant to kill.
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.
The Work of Spring
I clipped away dead branches
From the living shrubs today.
Not an easy thing,
But a thing that must be done.
Strange it is how dead things
Will cling so tightly to the living
As if to squeeze
The last remaining bits of life away
And thus, have company in death and dying.
There is yet more to do
So only the living things are left
To flourish in the spring sun.
Decision on a Birdfeeder
I hesitate in remembrance
as if the fates would choose
a day of gray and leave me there,
as if a blossoming could be had upon
a second visitation to any day.
The creamer clouds disperse and swirl
in my extra strong coffee
like memories of things I wanted–
never had, never attained
all those years ago.
Stirring the coffee still,
I stare out the kitchen window.
Decide against a bird feeder
filled with black oil sunflower seeds.
I do not want cardinals here.
People say cardinals are spirits
of those you’ve lost come to visit you—
No. I want no cardinals here.
No spirits of the lost to visit or say hello.
No twittering or chittering away.
No vibrancy of color outside this window.
No. Not here. Not in this place.
I’d rather this be a spiritless place,
A virgin place, void of spirits, void of touch—
At least for a time
Emerge
Days lengthen,
The sun returns
In an earnestness
We have not seen in months.
Not yet does the earth send warmth
Enough to climb through the soles of our feet–
Not yet warmth enough to creep onward up our legs,
Stretching, reaching toward our souls,
Where I carry the wish I have of you
One day, perhaps—
Perhaps, I may find the courage to grasp
In an aching, aging hand the bone to break
And set loose the wish I have of you.
Song of My Sisters
A daily battle with memories,
Offering emptiness,
Even the sparkle of gem like happiness,
Leaving small smiles for the moment—
Before tears begin.
Standing separated
From the ashes and earth
We once kissed and touched so tenderly,
All we embrace now—air,
Some ephemeral being of memory
As voice and smile and laughter fade.
Some of us,
Too many, told too often,
By those once precious, counted family,
Our grief, less than, less meaningful,
Really nothing more than dust,
Containing no rawness of a bloody heart.
Thus, I voice, singing the lament
Of my sisters in widowhood,
As we wait for our souls to soar–
To take flight once again.
When each in her turn is ready,
Able to begin,
Renewed,
Emerging, uncurling, however slowly,
From our blanketing storm clouds of grief,
Wings wet, drying in the sun.
