LATEST POSTS
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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 -
To my Aunt Cathy
Today, I came online to post that a couple of my poems were published, but this popped to the top of my library, a poem I posted four years ago. How it popped up, I will never know. Today, my Aunt Cathy is living her last breaths. We are all broken hearted. And it seems the only thing to do is to share this again. Peace –
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Pond and Brook
I leave my Pond and Brook
by the bedside,with its buzzing mayflies,
fin-splashed surface,
amoeba-soaked beach,and head downstairs,
to ease myself
through churning emailwhere minor decisions flutter
across dry laminate.All the while
the mayflies await my return,and chatter
through their own webs
of consequence. -
The hill faraway
The hill stands innocent
as it always has –empty now, or perhaps drowsily
crossed by weekend strollers.What is left of you there,
your fellow soldiers:the mud of your steps,
blood melting the snow?I breathe in here, where I am now,
and wonder if walkers there breathe you in.I ask if they have come to know you
as you were, as I never will –young, hunkered down,
slipping past signposts.Hills hold memories in their bones,
in their muscles of rocks and roots,in the chimes of their leaves overhead
where they mix them with now-life.It is for us to breathe and to witness,
to categorize if we can,
to share, to mix with our own.—————
For my father on Veteran’s Day.
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The history of my way through water
Does water remember
as I make my way across her
on this diagonal again?I clear a wake,
paddles’ light splashes,
this side, then the other.She self-heals
in a moment or two,
yet I wake-splash on.Tomorrow it will be the same –
me launching out,
she self-healing.I like to think
she takes a history down
as the ancient scholars wouldand passes it to the next paddler
on this path
if ever that should come to pass,and if never,
recalls my wake-splashes
as a giftshe could not hold
any other way
but in memory.
Inspired by Ian Stephen’s line (which is the title of this poem) quoted in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.
