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Posts Tagged ‘fairy tale’

The Ask

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 28, 2023| 2 Comments »

Among your duties, pleasure is a thing that also needs accomplishing.
            —Tony Hoagland, “The Word”
 
 
Perhaps it looked like I was dancing,
but I was being danced, was being twirled
by some great mystical spinning wheel
turning the straw of my thoughts into gold.
What a gift to have a body, to be alive
on a night when the sun is warm
and the grass is green and the mountains
are not yet tinder dry and the music is joyful
and the minutes slip through the hours
like page after page of happily ever
and there is no imp to be seen, just
the glory of brass shining in the air
and the miracle of hands clapping
as if applause is the only response that makes sense,
and the only thing the world asks of me
is to love it.

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After the Tortoise Won the Race

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 23, 2021| 10 Comments »




It was the strangest thing.
She’d never cared before about winning.
Life had been about basking in the sun
at the entrance to her burrow.
Sometimes when she was warm enough,
she’d plod off in search of leaves.

Now, she thought about finish lines.
The feel of the ribbon on her prehistoric nose.
The roar of the crowd as she crossed.
They say tortoises don’t have feelings,
no hippocampus in their small brains,
but she’d felt it, the thrill of success.

She spent decades looking for another race
she had a chance to win. None of her friends
could understand. Come dig in the sandy soil,
they said, but it wasn’t enough anymore.
She wished she’d never said yes to that race.
She wished she could race the hare again tonight.

She wished she could stop defining her life
by that one moment. Wished she could stop wishing
for any life beyond the life she had now,
sleeping in her burrow, cool and moist.
Wished all she wanted were soft weeds and long-leaf pines.
Wished she could hear that crowd just one more time.

published in ONE ART: A journal of poetry

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Gretel Talks to the Birds

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 6, 2013| 3 Comments »

Of course you thought
we were feeding you.
What else would we be doing
with that old, hard bread.
You were, just as we were,
only thinking of survival.
We were all so hungry then.
There’s a woman here
in Happily Ever After who
feeds poison to the birds.
She says the birds peck
at her red ripe cherries,
and where is the happily
in that? So she hides
the poison in Wonder bread
and then spreads it on the ground.
I’m telling you
this as your friend. Stay in
the woods. Happiness is not
all as it looks.

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