Tag: poetry

• On healing and revolution

  Gazing up this terrible mountain, you say, love is not enough, though when I add together everything else and stack it high above my head, everything else is not enough either. So I fall back on love, and it nudges me back to the task of gathering everything I can find – a pick ax,…

  Jenifer

  December 3, 2016

  Bite-sized sampler, Chicago, From Hafiz, Love, Political struggle, Violence, Work life

  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

• Your body is returned

  i. I know because you are me. You came here afraid, chased by storms. You huddle with spare, odd friends who you doubt you can trust. As the noise kicks up all around, you hunker down, raise strong the barriers, but they are cracked, indifferent. I know, because you are me. You curl up in…

  Jenifer

  November 17, 2016

  Childhood, Dying, From Hafiz, Grief, Pain, Political struggle, Violence

  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

• Wondrous grit of life

  o’ wondrous pain, illuminating discomfort — how you have painted this earth to suit your ease, the slow swing of your step it is perhaps a sign of your privilege that you praise cuts and bruises to small children who do not know to defend your princess could not sleep with even a pea under…

  Jenifer

  November 4, 2016

  Death, Dying, From Hafiz, Grief, Love, Mother, Muse, Pain, Tanka, 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