walking four blocks with my mother,
every step an arrival,
every step a reason to praise
Posts Tagged ‘gratitude’
One Month Out of ICU
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry, recovery, walking on August 27, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Letter to the Doctors and Nurses in the ICU
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doctor, gratitude, hospital, mother, nurse, poetry, prose poem on July 13, 2017| 6 Comments »
I know it’s your job, to monitor the heart rate as it rises, the blood pressure as it falls. I know the gray-haired woman in the bed is another set of numbers with a name you’ll forget. She’s my mother. She grows tomatoes on her porch and has a song to sing for every occasion. She loves side stroke and chocolate and Japanese art. She makes the best poached eggs, and she knows exactly how to scratch my head to lull me to sleep. I know it’s your job to find the clot. To bathe the wound. To ease the pain. Thank you. Thank you for your hands as they slip the needle into her arms, the arms that gather me when frightened or cold. Thank you for your feet as they run down the halls to examine her heart, her heart that holds so many. Thank you for your art as you puzzle the why of her body, her body that knows itself as a vessel for love and prayer. She is praying for you, even now, as I do, and though you are just doing your job, thank you.
This Night is Such a Night
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry on July 16, 2016| 3 Comments »
While the onions and celery forget themselves
in the butter and low heat, I walk to the garden
and gather spinach. It’s nearly time to pull the row—
the plants have begun to yellow and bolt—
but there remain enough dark green leaves
for a pot of fresh cream of spinach soup.
The evening is warm, and swallows dart and swoop
through the air. A haze drapes the midsummer sky.
For a moment I forget there is dinner
to make, a burner inside that will not wait.
For a moment my heart is as open
as the first calendula bloom in the garden,
all its many petals peeled back. It’s now I notice
I’ve been living only half open. Sometimes
we unfold just long enough that the world
can rush in and shake us awake
before we bend back in to our daily lists.
The soup has never been so deep green,
so rich. The night has never smelled so good.
Two Marvelings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, gratitude, love, moon, poem, poetry, river on April 21, 2016| 2 Comments »
just another full moon rise—
is it any wonder
I can’t stop bowing?
*
how, I said,
to the river bed
do you make
of yourself a home?
I let the flow shape me,
the river bed said—
flood, current,
shimmer, stone
Right Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry on January 9, 2016| 8 Comments »
I realized I was yearning for more than the riches the blessing of the day had brought.
—Alan Cohen, “Visitations”
Give me the napkins with stains on them,
the ones we’ve used for seven years.
Give me the butter dish with the broken lid,
the sound of my husband lightly snoring
on the couch with the missing buttons,
and the wild laughter of children
so loud I cannot hear the woman
on the other end of the phone.
Give me these wrinkles, this gray,
this softness I used to despise.
Give me exactly this life
that I have, wealthy with messes
I have helped to create, so rich
with nitty-gritties
that some nights I forget
that somewhere there’s a clean,
quiet, unbroken world
I once thought
I wanted to be part of.
Happy Thanksgiving
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry, thanksgiving on November 25, 2015| Leave a Comment »
I wish every one of you a day, a whole lifetime of giving thanks. Here’s a poem from a few months back published online today in Telluride Inside about radical gratitude, the kind that just rises on its own, no matter what … Autumnal
46th Birthday in Lone Tree Cemetery, Dia de los Muertos
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, cemetery, death, Dia de los Muertos, gratitude, poem, poetry on November 3, 2015| 3 Comments »
Past the grave of the baby girl,
past the grave of the beloved mother—
“we loved her,” it says in italic letters—
and past the grave with my birthday on it,
we find a tombstone greened in moss
with its names and dates long since lost.
The grass has nearly reclaimed the stone,
and we sit here together and talk for hours,
joyful expressions of dust as we laugh
and cry and remember just why
it is so damn sweet to be alive, to practice
what it means to love in the face of our impermanence.
All the leaves have left for the year,
but look at what remains—the chance
for sudden, immeasurable bliss
no matter what the season is.
I Couldn’t Have Explained it to You Then
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged evolution, gratitude, poem, poetry, sea on October 15, 2015| 5 Comments »
Some things do not easily
leave the sea.
In an instant they shift
from buoyant grace
to cumbersome weight.
Remember that night
we stood beside the surf
and the whole wet world
stretched shining before us?
We wrestled the wave runner
onto the trailer, and I
felt some kinship with
those first prehistoric fish
who dragged their lobe fins
onto the beach, those fish
who, driven by what?
struggled up and out
and learned a new way to move,
a new way to breathe,
grew a new kind of skin
and a new kind of spine.
For a moment, tugging
on the wet rope,
I knew it, some hint of the drive
bred into my body
over the past four hundred
million years. How I gasped
at the gift of it all—these
legs, these lungs, this upright head,
these biceps burning
against the burden
of emergence, the glitter
of light as it leaves, the scent
of honest sweat.
Digging Up Potatoes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, gratitude, harvest, poem, poetry, potato on August 29, 2015| 3 Comments »
There is no way to know
what we’ll find beneath
the yellowing leaves.
And always I forget
which varieties I’ve planted
and where. And so, when
the Finnish fingerlings appear
just below the surface,
I thrill in their golden
skin and knobby shapes,
and when the dark purple
potatoes emerge from the depths
of the garden bed,
by then, I am already kneeling,
but something inside kneels, too—
oh the russet and red-skinned
and pink-fleshed miracle of it all,
the sheer delight
of running my fingers
through the dirt and
pulling out potatoes,
each one somehow
a surprise, a small reminder
of how beautifully
the world can work,
how the darkness
nourishes such incredible
gifts. Ten hours since
I left the garden, and
whatever inside me knew to kneel
is still enthralled in prayer.
While On My Way Back to the Car
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, gratitude, poem, poetry, queen's crown, wildflower on July 28, 2015| 6 Comments »
It’s not that the queen’s crown changed anything,
not really. All it was doing was growing there
in the field beside the spruce.
But there it was, succulent and pink.
And there I was, not even knowing
how desperately I wanted to find
something beautiful, until I stumbled
on the flower, hiding as it was in the tall, tall grass.
And though it changed nothing,
it changed everything, the day
suddenly marked by treasure,
by luck. There are, surely, thousands
of chances each day for such astonishment,
thousands of openings
I never see, thousands of opportunities
to say, “This, this is why I am here.”
Crazy that finding a flower in the tall, tall grass
could obscure a whole world of troubles.
At least for a moment.
I will tell you where to find it,
though it wouldn’t be the same
if you were looking for it.
No, better to walk wherever it is
you are walking, better to stumble
as often as you can.