LATEST POSTS
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Seven attempts to settle my mind
i.
my mind chews its way
through each of my lessons
spitting back
what the animal dislikes
savoring its own justificationsii.
I am lost –
outbursted, debris stirred-up
from head to toe,
carnivorous, unyielding –
yet you wait for me, stilliii.
storm rides
its pounding path overhead
swallows me
while the eye between my two
observes, disregardsiv.
like convent doors
at the end of the school fair
my ears seal
to endless chatter
and seek secret solacev.
what I hear
if I listen with true ears
is your distant call
waiting to be heard,
asking where I have beenvi.
it is not for me
to say whether coming or going
is more or less noble
I shall sit to watch, regardless
prepare to make amendsvii.
my act of contrition
is to sit here with you –
to watch your moon rise
to shift around my spine
to rub my hands to warm them -
Old elm (revised)
Abandoned farmhouse,
graying outbuildings.
In your final winter, you stood
with empty, cracking branches
to tell us plain
that your kind shade would be gone –My father, too, would warn us so
in his gruffled, dying voice
to give us time to account,
to record, to not be frightened.Empty sky.
Time unwinds.
I see you bud up from soil
in a crowded prairie before
this town, this house,
my people.I bend here on your stump
shaved to the ground.
Our kinship remains.
Deeper need –
a certain kind of new breath.We vine together.
You remind me, I thank you.
You hold me, I bless you.
You become me, I become you.
Time and life give perspective anew, and this poem changed as a result. Four years ago almost to the day.
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And our longings will meet
coming in the house
with sand between your toes
or mud covering your boots,
you may pause
by my old needlepoint
and long for vague days
cradled in my arms,
singing on your father’s shoulders,
woods, dunes,
day dreaming on long highways,
prairie, corn stalks clicking by -
As we begin
rain falls from fog
through sleeping branches
(frail, broken sticks?),
soaks with slippery ease
into soil to restore themNote: For my friends at Yoga North as teacher training begins.
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2019, my Dad and coming back
2019 was a year that was filled with loss for me and my family – a dear aunt, my step mother and then Dad. I have not been able to write much, but am now ramping up for NaPoWriMo. Plus, I am beginning a yoga teacher training and have promised to rekindle my writing practice as part of this.
To recognize all this change, here is a favorite poem that I wrote for Dad, and a few links to others he inspired (he always made me think hard on Veteran’s Day). Hope you enjoy them.
How trees grow
Veteran’s Day poemsWalking through woods without my father
I am not sure if it is the breeze,
wilder, more freeing than any in the city,
or the wintergreen sending its scent
up to play with the blueberries and pine
that brings on this longing afresh.
You would perch yourself on a ridge
like this one overlooking the lakeor a forested horizon, endless to me,
and explain how the horses would trail
over the opposite ridge or
how they used to graze in the pasture
beyond that overgrown farm field,
how you’d camp between those two trees
when you were twelve, or on the beach.Even though this is a different woods,
new to you, I am somehow certain
you would have such stories to tell.
You’d pause to take in the air, deep
and daydreamy, with your easy
swing of a step that said
you were not in the city, no, not today.You’d skim your hand over the leaves
and look to the sky to tell me the time.
Dad at about age 12 (my personal favorite), age 20 (heading off to Korea), and age 70. -
Tanka for working from home
In interesting times,
I write at my son’s old desk
cut into his closet
stuffed with childhood remnants
curse, avalanche looms
Poems from in between 