Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, opening, poem, poetry on May 31, 2016| 2 Comments »
Who knew the heart
had so many doors,
most of them invisible
until the very moment
the hand brushes the knob,
and out of habit, perhaps,
the wrist makes a turn
and suddenly
there is an opening
where moments before
there was only wall.
There are thresholds
beyond our dreaming
right here within
the lives we live.
They have been here
all along.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, growth, nourishment, poem, poetry on May 30, 2016| 2 Comments »
The garden rows are visible now,
the slender shoots of carrots,
the succulent leaves of calendula,
the curly beginnings of kale—
after many years these first green shapes
feel like old friends.
I greet them as I walk the rows,
tell them they are doing fine.
And then there are the gaps
between the sprouts, the places
where I can only guess about
why the seeds don’t grow.
A lack of water? Planted too deep?
A shadow? A dud of a seed? A slug?
Of course I take it personally
and wonder what else I should have done.
And then I pull out the extra seeds
and fill in the spots where there is no green.
There is no use in blaming. Just plant the seed
where nothing is growing. It’s so simple,
the task, so lacking in blame.
There are gardens in me begging
for me to do the same—to notice
where there is failure to thrive,
and to seed again, then bring water,
bring nourishment, wait.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, nest, poem, poetry on May 29, 2016| 3 Comments »
The heart is like
this small brown bird
who finds in the lawn
a bit of dead grass
and flies it away
to build her nest—
sometimes it takes
so little to build
something beautiful.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, path, poem, poetry, wall on May 28, 2016| 4 Comments »
Walls will only crush you when they fall.
—Ray La Montagne, “Be Here Now”
So when
a wall forms
between us
let’s
reuse each
brick as cobblestone
we’ll build
our own path
as we go.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged champagne, glass half full, poem, poetry on May 27, 2016| 5 Comments »
It happens, sometimes,
the waiter notices
that your glass
is half empty
and so he walks over
with the bottle of champagne
and fills it again, and then
when it’s half empty
he fills it again,
and again,
and a whole morning
can pass just like this
sitting in the window
on a generous sofa
across from a friend—
outside the snow falls
on the newly green leaves
and inside,
though we plumb
the layers
of fear and loss,
it’s increasingly
hard to believe
in a glass ever being
half empty.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gift, poem, poetry on May 26, 2016| 1 Comment »
not all gifts are gifts we want
this one, perhaps, leave unopened
the day itself gift enough
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, rhubarb, sweetness, transformation on May 26, 2016| 1 Comment »
when I was four or five
and my mom took me
to a home where rhubarb
was growing.
The old woman there
cut the thick red stalks,
peeled back the tough outer skin
and then sprinkled
the naked stem
with sugar. The crystals
stuck to the wetness.
Take a bite, she urged,
my first invitation
to learn how
it takes so little sweetness
sometimes to transform
a sourness into something
we might learn to love.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, time on May 25, 2016| 3 Comments »
What if it’s not an hourglass?
What if our time here
is more like sand
in a six million
mile an hour
wind
?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, mothering, poem, poetry on May 24, 2016| 7 Comments »
We sometimes slip into w-wanguage,
a tongue my son invented, though no longer speaks.
My daughter and I are the two sole speakers
and we often find ourselves saying
What wa wabulous way, or
Womma, wan wi wease wave wore wapples?
The rules are simple.
We break them anyway,
forgetting to w or tripping over
our own expectations of how a word should sound.
In the end, the desire to speak clearly
and to be understood always wins.
Other times we’ll speak in nonsense syllables,
long strings of babble bellowed or crooned.
We’ll wave our hands, as if there is something
really at stake—like the desire to be understood.
Perhaps this is why whatever syllables
she utters, I will eventually echo them back,
stroking her hair, looking her right in the eye,
letting her know for certain
I know exactly what she means.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged joy, poem, poetry, present on May 22, 2016| 1 Comment »
soused with joy—
unable to remember any myth
that didn’t end happily