still this longing
to bring a golden cup
and hold it
to your sweet
parched lips
Posts Tagged ‘healing’
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.
When I Hear Myself Say Never
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.
Having Read the Book of Myths
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, healing, memory, poem, poetry on July 17, 2015| 3 Comments »
Nothing grows here in the courtyard, not anymore.
Once there were roses in every bed,
impossibly always in full, unguarded flower.
Once there was always perfume, always opening.
It is not hard to remember the peonies, the parsley,
the surprising upstarts of basil, the hanging baskets
with long sweeping tendrils of bloom.
Once there were minstrels who never stopped singing.
The air always wore a silken song.
And now it is gone.
I do not know why I have come here again,
I who once planted these gardens, I who once
played the lute. I thought I had left them for good.
I’m surprised there are not even weeds here. Nothing
in the cracks of the sandstone steps.
Nothing in the empty beds.
It was not exactly a wrong turn
that brought me here, more of a wandering.
It was not really curiosity, more coincidence.
But isn’t it strange? Not even bindweed? Not lamb’s quarters?
Not even a blade of cheat grass?
The fountain in the center has not crumbled,
though no water flows in it. All the bricks
in the archways are still intact.
There is a gate. It always used to be locked,
but now it swings open at the slightest push.
It is innocent. I was the one who had locked it.
I knew what it was for.
If I’d known I were coming, would I have brought
some kind of offering? A poem, perhaps, or
tea leaves? Some flowers to scatter? Some seeds?
My hands flutter empty. They are unembarrassed
by their lack. There are no sacrifices to be made.
Once there were birds making play out of sky.
There is no sadness in remembering this.
I walk the paths. The way is still worn.
My feet know where to go. There is nothing
to bring back, nothing hidden in the walls.
Perhaps this is what I came for.
Imagine What Might Happen Then
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, healing, heart, love, poem, poetry, sun on June 17, 2014| 1 Comment »
Almost every heart
we know
is wounded—
all the more reason
to learn the language the sun speaks
when it touches the meadow in spring,
and then speak
like that
to each other.
Just Not on My Timeline
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doctor, healing, miracle, pain, poem, poetry on January 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »
I went in
expecting a miracle.
I wanted to be healed
when I walked out the door.
Instead, the doctor
told me there was nothing
he could do. Told me
the problem. Told me
the solution. Long and
painful. And then
he said he could help me.
I left feeling hopeless.
Frustrated. Spent. And still
in so much pain.
I went in expecting a miracle.
I think that’s what
he gave you,
my friend later said.
After Reading Owl’s Letter of Evie’s Bike Accident
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bike accident, friendship, Geibel, healing, love, poem, poetry, Schumann on December 30, 2013| 1 Comment »
“It is so sweet,” the song says,
“to jest with songs and with hearts
and with serious combat.”
I do not know the poet,
Emanuel Geibel, nor have I played
Schumann’s Der Hidalgo, Opus 30 No. 3.
But this is what I turn to, Evie,
when I hear you are in Room 879.
I found the text first. “I am always ready
for love or for a fight.” Of course
I would think of you then, you who are
both lover and fighter,
fiercely, equally at the same time.
If I could, I would sit beside
the hospital bed and hum lieder,
hum so I would not mispronounce
the German. Better yet, I would bring
your electric piano to your room
and plunk at the keys in my awkward way
so you could hum along. As the Hidalgo says,
“I sing outside many a grilled window,
and I mock many a knight with an insolent song.”
Surely the pain is a knight worth mocking.
Surely we could conjure up ample insolence
even as we praise the graying winter sky
beyond the window glass, praise the birds
winging past the frame that neither of us
(but your husband) could name, praise
the music of heartache and blossom and loss,
and praise and curse the passions that lead you
to the roads you love.
“Tomorrrow,” says the song, “I shall carry home
flowers or wounds.” I would always wish
for you flowers. Acres and acres of daffodils.
Red buds at the end of your drive. Magnolias
throwing their blossoms into your yard.
But here, the wounds. You have known them before,
and still off you go, as Geibel writes, “off, then,
to adventure!” To adventure, Evie,
to adventure! Oh damn. To adventure! The wounds.
To adventure! Your pelvis. Your clavicle. Your ribs.
One morning, while I was still in sleep,
you came to wake me, humming, and cupping
in your hands a dark and bitter delicious brew.
How I would love to come to you now
with something dark and delicious, something
I knew could make you smile, something
satisfying to warm you, rouse you, though we both
know how bitter it is.
After the Slam
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged healing, love, poem, recovery, slam, thumb on May 16, 2012| 5 Comments »
It hurts worst
in the first few hours,
when the purple
leaps up in the moon
of the nail,
and it pulses, throbs,
how the thumb’s pulp
strains against
the skin’s chapel,
and the wrinkles
erase themselves
as the knuckle swells.
Tell yourself
at least it was
only your thumb.
Tell yourself
it was no one’s fault.
Tell yourself
it is not at all
like the heart.
It will heal.
The hurt
will be gone.
But I Don’t Need to Do that Anymore Tanka
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged freedom, healing, poems, poetry, self-defeating behavior, spiritual growth, suffering, tanka on March 8, 2012| 3 Comments »
these scars on my arm?
I used to walk my hell with me
everywhere on a leash
and let it bite me sometimes
just to be sure it still hurt