Category: Meditation

• The heart needs good work

  All that comes to me now is the prairie, how it is empty to the casual eye, how you walk or see for miles, alone, how you wonder ever why on the absence of your fellow creatures. Will you get another dog? it asks me, or a grandmother, or husband, or son? Do they make…

  Jenifer

  January 26, 2017

  Aging, Dog, Grief, Illinois, Meditation, Nature, Yoga

  poetry

• Small endurances

  Puddles of snow pool under shrubs – miniature glaciers for voles to cast through. Sparrows, geese, all as one gather round the warmth floating up from the subway grate. Frozen, withered leaves dangle under squirrel’s tiny pads stirring breath in the still air. Here, in a far corner of my heart a soft flutter —…

  Jenifer

  January 15, 2017

  Grief, Meditation, Memory, Muse, My window at night, Seasons

• Last breaths

  Evergreens surround your house, a fortress wall heavy with snow. In black recesses I wade, the snow bounds off the branches finds bare ankles inside my boots, my hair, a teaspoon down my collar. I approach your home to find windows boarded and roof patched. You are dying there, heaving, uneven breaths, a fortress with…

  Jenifer

  December 17, 2016

  Death, Dying, Family, Garden, Meditation, Muse, Seasons

  poetry

• 11/20

  Earth grieves each November, again finds itself wailing in sorrow, refusing to get out of bed. For its own tears and distresses, the world collapses into itself, spends the month grinding through cold damp, discordant winds, while its resistance slips away into the long lonely meditation that always follows death. ———- From Li Po, “Listening…

  Jenifer

  November 20, 2016

  Bite-sized sampler, Death, From Li Po, Grief, Meditation, Muse, Nature, Seasons

  poetry

• Waiting for the doctor

  hazy dry, as if in midair distant beeps, rattles, blood pressure cuff wheezing up, releasing, hour after hour, day may become day Of all possible recollections, you pick the one from December twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth, you revolve, nineteen-fifty-three in ice cold Korea showering down in luxuriance, soap, frigid water trailing over your skin after…

  Jenifer

  November 10, 2016

  Aging, Death, Dying, Meditation, Memory, My family, Parenting, Veteran’s Day, Violence

  poetry

• So cold the sky

  waves roll in, tossed over themselves by November winds that scrape surface up and over, up and over, coil under clouds, moan through cedars, find me here, damp, burying the roots of this sapling today as if in a ceremony of dark days, bewitched by the sky long turned cold and forceful, my magic increases…

  Jenifer

  October 25, 2016

  Ancient, Art, Fantasy, Meditation, Muse, My window at night, Nature, Pentwater, Seasons, Story, Traveling

  poetry