Let’s play, said the wind.
Go away, I said.
Let’s play, said the wind.
Not today, I said.
Right now, said the wind.
But how? I said.
And the wind made a kite
of my auburn hair
and my words of dissent
skipped away on the air.
Play more? said the wind.
Um, sure? I said.
The wind played me like chimes,
played both fierce and tender,
and it whipped me and kissed me
into surrender.
You’ve changed, said the wind.
Rearranged, I said.
Play again? said the wind.
Yes, friend, I said.
Archive for April, 2018
Making Peace with the Wind in La Sal, Utah
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged la sal, poem, poetry, utah, wind on April 29, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Kindness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flower, kindness, poem, poetry, tulip on April 29, 2018| 1 Comment »
Consider the tulip,
how it rises every spring
out of the same soil,
which is, of course,
not at all the same soil,
but new. How long ago
someone’s hands planted a bulb
and gave to this place
a living scrap of beauty.
Consider the six red petals,
the yellow at the center,
the soft green rubber of the stem,
how it bows to the world. How,
the longer we sit beside it,
the more we bow to it.
It is something like kindness,
is it not? The way someone plants
in you a bit of beauty—a kind word,
perhaps, or a touch, the gift
of their time or their smile.
And years later, in the soil that is you,
it emerges again, pushing aside
the dead leaves, insisting on beauty,
a celebration of the one who planted it,
the one who perceives it, and
the fertile place where it has grown.
Special Edition
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged news, poem, poetry, Thich Nhat Hanh on April 29, 2018| Leave a Comment »
in response to The Good News by Thich Nhat Hanh
Good news. The ant on your toe does not want to bite you.
He is a traveler on the country of your foot, and he is teaching you
about the borders you have drawn around your kingdom.
Yes, the young sapling beside you has died, but there,
beside it, a new sapling is carrying on what it means to be tree.
The good news is that the daffodils, planted by some unknown hand,
have returned, and they bob their yellow fringe in the wind,
their cups filled with unspillable light.
The goldfinches find food beneath the old spruce.
And the meadowlark has turned the fencepost
into a concert hall.
And more good news. You noticed that there was a line drawn
between us and them, and you, with your ardent mind,
you picked up that line and refashioned it into a spiral.
And in this moment, the good news is that the sun is warm
on your shoulders and your eyes feel like closing and you
let them close.
The good news is that despite the passing hours, the passing years,
there is no end to good news waiting to be found
and you are just beginning to understand how infinite this special edition.
Anna Akhmatova Speaks After the Revolution
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anna akhmatova, Art, poem, poetry, Russia on April 27, 2018| 3 Comments »
We dreamed of revolution.
What came to Russia was terror,
terror that left us voiceless,
faceless, betrayed.
Blood in the streets.
Blood splattered on boots.
Blood that stank like blood.
I stood seventeen months
in prison lines three hundred women long,
waited to plead with the hangman
for my son. Seventeen months
I listened to the scrape
of the iron key that never
opened the lock.
Leave, said my friends
as they fled our land,
Leave Russia forever, they said.
But I could no more leave
the birches and pines,
the high mountains and endless steppes,
no, I could no more leave
the Russian people
than I could leave my own skin.
The government called me
an anachronism. They snarled,
“half nun, half whore.” They claimed
I contributed nothing to communism.
Burned my books. Forbid me
to publish more.
They killed my ex-husband.
My next husband, too.
They claimed intelligence
was a sin.
But when we’re silenced,
that’s the summons for our voice to grow,
and I went from the voice
of one woman wanting
to the voice of over
a hundred million mouths screaming,
screaming for freedom, for justice, for life.
They thought that by corseting my words
they could contain them. But they thought wrong.
Now, I whisper poems into the ears of my friends
and my words travel on, become living poems,
poems that throng in the streets.
Poems that stand in line and speak
to the women with blue lips who wail.
Poems that turn into ribbons
that flutter beyond the butcher’s reach.
Poems that slip beneath locked doors
that speak of suffering, futile war.
Now I know what art is for.
A Vanilla Honey Scent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged missing, poem, poetry, sweet clover on April 25, 2018| Leave a Comment »
scent of sweet clover—
wishing I could send it to you
send you, too,
this woman
alone in a field
surrounded
by sweet clover,
her head tipping back
in ecstasy
where the cup your hand
could be.
Anna Akhmatova Remembers Paris, 1911
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anna akhmatova, ars poetica, love, modigliani, poem, poetry on April 25, 2018| Leave a Comment »
When I met Amadeo Modigliani,
I knew of hunger
what did I know of love?
I was in Paris. On my honeymoon.
As my new husband met with other women
i met with Amadeo, an impoverished Italian Jew.
His paintings not yet famous.
We would walk Parisian streets
in the warm summer rain
and snuggle under his black umbrella
and recite by heart poems from Verlaine together.
He begged me, don’t go back to Russia.
Russia? I said, where is that? It’s Russiya.
Don’t go back to Russiya, Anna.
I did.
That winter he wrote me in Petrograd:
Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise;
You are obsessively part of me.
I knew it was true,
that he was more myself
than my own familiar hands.
Back in Petrograd,
I would touch my lips in the mirror
and say my own name
and believe my voice was his.
I think of Lot’s wife.
How they told her not to turn,
to not look at Sodom, her home
even as it was being destroyed
but how could she not
turn to the green fields where she had sung,
turn to the bed where her children
were made, turn to the place
of her blood?
When I turned back to Paris
because his love felt like home
even though i knew it would be destroyed,
I was not transformed into salt
but into chalk, black chalk, his chalk on paper.
I did not know then
how that I would come
to treasure his vision,
how I would tape his drawing
on the wall in every house
i ever lived in so I could live again
between those lines in a time
of wild honey, scent of beeswax candles,
his amber eyes.
Amedeo always drew me naked
in long spare lines—
Always from memory when he was alone.
With me, his hands
were too busy for chalk.
He’d slip off my dress,
and in my breast,
he’d visit my beloved Russian steppes,
in my waist, he buried himself
in Siberian snow,
and between my thighs,
he was baptized again and again
in the floodwaters of the Neva River.
They’d not yet made
a corset that will fit me—
how could it when I
am all of Russia?
Oh I loved him. Wrote him poems.
Left red roses strewn on his studio floor.
How airy the light was then.
How I loved being what they would later call me,
polovina monakhini, half nun,
polovina shlyukha, half whore.
April 23
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, hummingbird, love, poem, poetry, trust on April 23, 2018| 2 Comments »
How do they do it,
the broad-tailed hummingbirds,
arriving at my window
the same day every year,
welcome as spring,
reliable as moon.
And what part of me
thrills in their predictability?
And what part says,
a tad too triumphantly,
See, here’s proof,
things come back.
I hear the small birds
before I see them,
their wingtips trilling,
I’ve read how the feathers
that make the sound wear down
from use. By midwinter,
you can barely hear
their bright hum at all until,
preparing to breed,
they grow new feathers again.
How do they do it,
grow feathers at just the right time?
I want to linger in the small
miracle of it, these ears still learning
how to hear and this heart still
astonished at the timing
of the world, how life just knows
when to return, when to grow.
A Poem Bouquet from Costa Rica
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged costa rica, poem, poetry, rainforest, travel on April 22, 2018| 1 Comment »
path through the jungle—
so much has to change
to stay the same
*
zipline so fast
even my shadow can’t find
a place to land
*
hanging bridges
above the deep chasms—
panic disguised as hope
*
a fourth star
in Orion’s belt—
in fact, a firefly
*
love starved—
instead of catching the bigger fish
eating the bait
*
dismantling the gate
at the chambers of the heart—
using the wood for a bridge
*
pouring out from the tree’s thorns
and army of fire ants—
nearby the ylang ylang spreads perfume
*
diving into the waves—
if only all chaos
had a trapdoor
*
beneath the waterfall
riding the rope swing, wondering—
does our joy release into the world?
*
meanwhile, in the rainforest,
the purple orchid peels back its petals,
reinvents opening
*
questions that start with why
are the hardest to answer—
the lizard walks on water
*
smaller than a thimble
this frog beside the river—
universe size, my wonder
*
this old oyster shell
worn by waves into a heart—
love this world, love this world
*
after two days,
the purple orchids are spent—
giving myself to the waves
*
the gray and brown wren—
its bright song a mailbox
red flag up
*
ten thousand times ten thousand
waves on the beach—
letting each one rename me
*
beside the great strangler fig
enjoying feeling small
in the big, big world
By Chance
Posted in Uncategorized on April 8, 2018| 2 Comments »
Beside the highway
two moose graze in a meadow
rung with new snow—
While the body goes sixty
the mind slows to stay
in that meadow with two moose
grazing, and all around them,
snow.
*
Dear Poetry Friends,
I will be taking a technology break for a while, and when I return, I’ll bring you a big bouquet of poems all at once!
-r
One Inspired by Buson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bells, Buson, poem, poetry on April 7, 2018| Leave a Comment »