Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, healing, love, poem, poetry, potatoes on May 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
with thanks to Artful for the fabulous starts
Last year’s potatoes—
small red fists
with stubby white shoots—
they have something
to teach the heart about
unclenching,
about how to find something of value
in their own darkness
something that knows how to reach
toward the light,
something that when faced
with darkness again
will reach even farther
until they become
astonishingly prolific, alive.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, ordinary life, parenting, poem, poetry on December 26, 2016| 2 Comments »
her daughter has a tumor behind her knee.
Already it’s grown into the bone.
Very aggressive, the doctor says,
and though he names the diagnosis,
he tells my friend not to Google it.
Sometimes what we know
creates more footholds for fear. There’ll be surgery,
the doctor says, and chemo.
I want to give her a brush tonight, nothing special,
one she could pull through her own long hair
and then through her daughter’s dark curls, as well.
How commonplace to brush and comb,
to unsnarl the tangles and make one’s hair
smooth again. I want to give her the terrible gift
of the habitual life—the tedious days in which we
brush and wash and dress and sleep and work
and laugh and shit and yell and fuss and forget
how fragile we are, forget how temporary
these bodies can be, forget how bloody lucky
we are every minute to be alive.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, poem, poetry, time on August 14, 2016| 1 Comment »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, poem, poetry on May 15, 2016| 3 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doctor, healing, parenting, poem, poetry, rash on November 10, 2015| 1 Comment »
Doctors, said the professor
to the room of fresh pre-meds,
know this:
Eighty percent of the people
you treat will get better
even if you do nothing.
Ten percent will heal because
of what you do. And ten percent
will get worse because of what you do.
Let’s begin.
Tonight, as my daughter’s skin
blooms increasingly red—
a rash staining her trunk,
her face, her limbs—I consider
what the professor said.
She is long past the age
where I can heal things
with a kiss. Still, I kiss her,
knowing this to be the best medicine
eighty percent of the time.
I give her a dose of jokes,
and prescribe another chapter
of The Silver Chair. We read
as the red grows angrier.
She laughs when I tell her
at least she didn’t break her arm
or lose all of her hair.
I hate how helpless I feel.
Though I did not enter
the rooms of dissection
nor memorize tomes
of bones and diseases and cures,
I still have the longing
to heal, to remove the pain, to nurse.
If she is afraid, she does not show it.
I disguise my fear. I give her
another kiss. It won’t, at least,
make anything worse.
*with thanks to Dr. John Belka for the story that opens this poem.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, healing, music, poem, poetry, violin on October 29, 2015| 2 Comments »
In the Midst of the Wreckage
Make in my heart a concert hall
where a single violin
plays on the vacant stage
reminding me in a minor key,
that one true song
touches every broken,
twisted, rotted thing
invites us to lean deeper into,
no, to fall completely
into the beauty
we stopped believing in.
Let me not just hear the song,
let me tear down the heart’s walls
so everyone can hear.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eating disorder, healing, poem, poetry, possibility on August 8, 2015| 4 Comments »
You never really recover.
That’s what the woman told me
her friend had said.
We were talking about
eating disorders.
There’s no way to make
that line sound poetic.
Her friend ran a program
at a hospital for other women
with eating disorders.
Her friend knew the subject personally.
I remember, I told the woman,
when I believed the same thing.
Until one day, it happened.
I just didn’t know
it was possible because
for so many, many years
it hadn’t happened to me,
though I tried, I tried.
Whenever it happened,
there were no fireworks,
no symphonies, no ecstatic dance,
no revelations written in clouds.
No rhapsody, no reveille, no
parade, no streams of light.
It happened so quietly I didn’t notice—
not for days, weeks, perhaps months.
Now I lean in when I hear myself say never.
What a fine time to get very curious.
What a fine time to get very quiet,
even quieter than that.
