all day, the candle’s light
almost invisible, all day
I think of the girl
in the hospital, all day
to the light that is, adding more light
Posts Tagged ‘healing’
One Prayer for Healing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged candle, healing, light, poem, poetry on January 2, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Eventually
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dirt, healing, poem, poetry, process on December 30, 2018| 6 Comments »
with thanks to JT
Start in the dirt,
said the photographer,
then elevate from there.
And though I was thinking
of poems, and though
he was speaking of images,
I immediately leapt to healing.
Just today I heard of a girl
who, on Christmas morning,
learned her stomach ache was cancer.
I called her mother
to console her, though
I was the one near tears.
Start in the dirt.
Ammons, my hero, once
looked to the dirt
in search of something
lowly, but all he could find
was magnificence. Within
a stanza, he launched
from ticks to galaxies.
Sometimes in the dirt
all I see is dirt.
I held back the tears until
after we hung up the phone,
then wept. I wanted to find
some shred of magnificence
in her story, but it is, perhaps,
too soon. No magnificence. I suppose
that’s the invitation to stay in the dirt,
stay there until I know, really know,
there is nothing lowly. Not
the lichen. Not the slug. Not the ant.
Not mutating cells.
Hafiz, my hero, once wrote
that everything, everything
is holy. Sometimes I want
to argue with him.
Start in the dirt. Yes.
Perhaps I will be here a while.
I have some practicing to do.
It may be some time
before I elevate.
Wish
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged father, Father's Day, healing, poem, poetry, rain on June 17, 2018| 6 Comments »
for my father
And when at last
the healing comes,
may it come like the rain
after a long drought,
so soft that at first
you aren’t sure
it is raining,
but the fragrance
overcomes you,
green and wet,
and the world
looks dewy and
you feel it in your lungs.
Yes, may the healing
arrive on the edge
of perception
and then feel
wholly present,
as today when the rain turned
long and steady,
the kind that slowly
saturates and changes everything
so quietly that
you almost don’t remember
what it was like before
and everywhere you look,
all you see is promise.
After All This Talk of Healing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, nest, poem, poetry, wound on November 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Planting the Cloud Acre Reds
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.
In the Letter My Friend Says
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, ordinary life, parenting, poem, poetry on December 26, 2016| 4 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.
One Eventually
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, poem, poetry, time on August 14, 2016| 1 Comment »
Though I Am Thirsty, Too
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, poem, poetry on May 15, 2016| 3 Comments »
What I Did Not Learn in Medical School
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.
In the Midst of the Wreckage
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.
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