Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, warmth, wish on January 23, 2020| 2 Comments »
Perhaps because I am cold
I want to bring you warmth—
isn’t that how it goes?
We wish for each other
what we most want for ourselves.
And so I wish you real love,
the kind that is as familiar
as brushing your teeth, as spectacular
as the sky tonight drenching the world
in pink just before
the dark took everything.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, garden, gardener on January 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
As surely as I know how to spell harvest,
I understood today that no matter our job titles,
our work is gardener: always the same:
Plant the seeds. Tend what grows. Nourish.
Pinch back. Repeat. What a gift to see, at last,
the size of the garden. What a gift
to be in service to the world—to pull up
our sleeves, to smell the earth, to take
what we’ve been given and make it better,
to feed the others, to do it again.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged armageddon, dream, gratitude on January 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »
I woke up giddy, because
on rising, there was still
a world. Snow out the window,
and a window! And a cover
on the bed. And a bed!
And a body that ached
from the fall in the trees,
but dang, I had a body.
And it woke up! And yeah,
there is work to do, lots
and lots of work to do,
and love to make and
messes to clean, and
yes, here we are to do it.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, seeds, speaking, sunflower, truth on January 20, 2020| 2 Comments »
Inside the bright words
there are other words
that want to be said—
small words
in dark shells.
.
It reminds me
of the sunflowers
that grew in the fall—
how we loved them
for their golden petals,
but they were true
to the small dark seeds
that grew them,
to the small dark seeds
they grew.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged interview, Naked for Tea, The Colorado Sun on January 19, 2020| 3 Comments »
photo by Kaycee Clark
What poem scared you the most to write? What did you learn while researching poems? those are two of the questions I was asked in the interview for The Colorado Sun about my most recent book, Naked for Tea. The interview was published today–coordinated in part by the Colorado Author’ League. Read it here, and find, too, a link to a poem from the book about how we help each other as we are “lost.”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breath, breathing, connection, help on January 19, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The world enters
us as breath. We
return to it itself
as breath.
—Joseph Hutchison, “Comfort Food: Breath”
And so today, on a day
when I feel quite sure
I can’t give you anything,
not anything that really matters,
I give you my breath.
It’s more conceptual
than actual, perhaps,
though scientists say
that the molecules we breathe
have been redistributed
in our atmosphere
for a century or two.
I decide to breathe as if.
As if with each breath,
I connect to you. As if
with each breath, we
become just a little
more each other
one molecule at a time.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged avocado, food, Kyra Kopestonksky, new, prayer on January 18, 2020| 4 Comments »
After cutting open hundreds, thousands
of avocados, I marvel as my friend Kyra
cuts off the top. Slices it right off.
And I stare at her, at the knife, at the tip
of the avocado listing on the cutting board.
How easily she scoops out the creamy green flesh.
How simply she cuts more rounds around the pit.
All these years, I’ve sliced avocados lengthwise.
It’s as if I’ve just learned a new word for yes.
As if the sun itself just rose right here in the kitchen.
It takes so little to open us, to help us
see everything new. Even that prayer I pray
the same way. These hands. This common fruit.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bliss, day, god, sufi, thirst, wine on January 16, 2020| 2 Comments »
The Sufis had it right—
the day is a glass of wine.
It matters not what kind
of vessel it’s poured into—
chipped clay or crystal
or wooden cup. There
is divinity in it regardless—
the chance to dance alongside
the rational, logical self
and fall in love. It brings
the potential for bliss,
for persuasiveness, for imagination,
for spontaneous and riotous
laughter. And you, perhaps,
like I, are beginning to realize
just how dry the mouth,
just how thirsty the heart.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cat, grief, hope, loss, tenderness, what is on January 15, 2020| 7 Comments »
|
Eventually a burning hope |
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged desert, loss, ocean, poem, poetry, rain on January 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
deep desert canyon of the heart—
it remembers when
it was ocean