for Kayleen
rolling up my sleeves
in this grand beauty parlor—
help wanted
Posts Tagged ‘beauty’
One Dream Job
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, work on March 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Hope
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, heron, hope, wasteland on January 5, 2021| 5 Comments »
Nudged by hope
the heart rises
from exhaustion.
It’s like the great blue heron
I saw this morning
flying up from a wasteland
on broad gray wings
with strong, slow beats
for a moment charged
with grace
before—did you
see this, heart?—
it chose to land again,
bringing all its beauty
to the desolate place.
This poem is published in the wonderful ONE ART Poetry Journal
Thanking the Christmas Cactus
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, hope, news, plants on December 29, 2020| 7 Comments »
Tonight, for a moment,
my world shrinks to the size
of the Christmas cactus,
which, despite the storm
that even now blusters outside,
has opened dozens of voluptuous
red blooms, as if to say,
Here I am, blooming midwinter,
and you can do it, too.
There are days when
the news makes me doubt
the value of blooming—
when the headlines alone
twist hope into a crumpled,
unrecognizable heap.
But then some snippet
of beauty finds me—
a scarlet flower,
a handwritten letter—
and breaks any scale
I would use to interpret
the world. It’s not that the terror
goes away, no. But for a few
moments, I am blessed
with the certainty
that even the smallest beauty matters
and that it is my job
to meet life however it appears—
petal, bomb, sweetness, pain—
grateful for my humanness,
vulnerable and tenuous
though it is.
Concurrent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, nature, praise, snow, wound on December 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »
On a morning
when the snow
falls and drapes
everything in shine,
it is not that I don’t
feel the wounds—
raw and throbbing—
it’s just that it’s
so beautiful,
this tender world,
that I want
to praise it
forever.
Attuned
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged attunement, beauty, calendula, strength on October 1, 2020| 6 Comments »
I want to meet the world
the way these calendula blossoms
meet the cold.
While everything around them
has wilted or browned,
they lift up their gold and orange faces
like bright earthbound suns—
not with some agenda
to make the world a better place,
but because they are doing
what they are made to do—
to be soft yet resilient,
beautiful and tough,
to carry inside themselves
the seeds for more beauty,
and, when the time comes,
spill them everywhere.
Why I Smile at Strangers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, blaise pascal, fear on September 27, 2020| 6 Comments »
In difficult times, carry something beautiful in your heart.
–Blaise Pascal
And so today, I walk the streets
with vermillion maple leaves inside me,
and the deep purple of late-blooming larkspur
and the lilting praise of meadowlark.
I carry with me thin creeks with clear water
and the three-quarters moon
and the spice-warm scent of nasturtiums.
And honey in the sunlight.
And words from Neruda and
slow melodies by Erik Satie.
It is easy sometimes to believe
that everything is wrong.
That people are cruel and the world
destroyed and the end of it all
imminent. But there is yet goodness
beyond imagining—the creamy
white flesh of ripe pears
and the velvety purr of a cat in my lap
and the white smear of milky way—
I carry these things in my heart,
more certain than ever that one way
to counteract evil is to ceaselessly honor what’s good
and share it, share it until
we break the choke hold of fear
and at least for a few linked moments,
we believe completely in beauty,
growing beauty, yes, beauty.
Between
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, door, in between spaces on August 31, 2020| 4 Comments »
with thanks to Rebecca Mullen for showing me the doors
And if a door closes
before another opens,
well, sometimes in the hall
between those doors
I find the precarious beauty
that can only be met
when I am not quite safe,
not quite certain, not quite
a self, and wholly here.
I’m talking tiny dust mote
in the deep field beauty—
beauty that refuses
to be named.
This is what it’s like
to learn to trust—
to live with one arm forward,
one arm back and feel
marvelously stretched,
perilously opened,
like a flute, like a kite,
like a wing.
One Survival
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, survival on August 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »
One Small Act
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, cleaning on April 9, 2020| 2 Comments »