Posted in Uncategorized, tagged happy ending, hero, minor key, poem, poetry on January 5, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The hero in me
wants only a happy ending,
but tonight at the concert
every song I loved best
ended in a minor key
that lingered in the air
like a half formed rainbow,
like the scent of soil
after a punishing rain.
How do I teach that hero
to love the dissonance,
to settle into the discord
to shed her raincoat
and stand in the mess
and say ahhhhh?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hero, poem, poetry, showing up, Taming of the Shrew, theater on June 8, 2019| Leave a Comment »
And after the lying and cheating
and scratching and beating
and lusting and raging,
deceiving and craving,
after almost three hours
we finally know
that no one, no one
is a hero.
And we walk
through the rain
on this imperfect night
to the stain of our cars
and our imperfect lives.
And it rains.
In the great cast list,
my name will be
listed as the woman
who always played me—
the one who never
quite got the role right,
but damn,
she showed up
with her lines
every night.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, family, father, fireman, hero, life, poem, poetry on February 10, 2018| Leave a Comment »
for Billy Miller, remembering events on January 4, 2012
When the man pulled my father
from the icy waters of Lake Michigan,
he did not know years later my step-daughter
would need someone to buy her a sweater
so she would feel nurtured, did not know
that my son would need someone
to make a mosaic with him so that he
could feel loved, did not know
that my daughter would need
someone to tell her that she
was beautiful. When the man
pulled my father out of the water—
my dad had been fishing alone—
that off-duty fireman couldn’t have known
that years later this very daughter
would sit beside her father and hold his hand
and weep at the simple gift
of being able to hold his hand.
The fireman was doing what he knew to do—
to rush to the person in need of help.
He didn’t think then of the other lives
blessed by the man. Did not think
of the other lives he blessed with his hands
when he chose to try, though the odds
of saving the man were low.
He knew only to reach.
Years later, my mother still sleeps
beside the man that was pulled
from the winter lake.
Give us hands that know to reach
for each other—stranger, neighbor,
friend. Give us hands that unthinkingly
choose to save the family
we’ve never met.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hero, parenting, poem, poetry on June 25, 2015| 5 Comments »
—after Alden Nowlan, “In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus”
I don’t want to be a super hero,
not every day for the rest of my life,
but for one morning, when not a whole lot
was going wrong with the world,
when Lex Luthor and the Joker
and whoever it is that steals
single socks from the drier were all
sleeping in instead of causing mischief,
well, that morning I would like to meet
Spider Man and Bat Man and Super Man
and the customer service woman at iTunes
who got me the whole refund after my son
thought he found a glitch in their system
and ordered $440 worth of gemstones
in Clash of Clans, yeah, her and the Green Lantern
and Emily Dickinson and Temple Grandin and the Hulk,
and all those other heroes, and, we’d be sitting around a table
in a sunny diner somewhere, not talking
for once about how to save the world,
just reading the menu, discussing the reasons we prefer
our eggs poached or scrambled or fried,
you know, something about the way
that the yolk when it’s not cooked too long
will spill its gold all over the toast, and
the waitress would come and pour us more coffee,
and there would be no reasons for anyone
to hop up from the meal and pull on their cape.
Nope, we’d just sit there as morning
yawned into midday chatting about how the rains
came at just the right time this year, and how
the fireflies were out last night, and did you catch
that new movie about the mother
who gets her kids ready for school every morning—
and then we’d just slip into that comfortable silence
that sometimes comes when the stomach
is full and the body is warm and you just
have that feeling that nothing could ever go wrong,
well, at least not for a while, not before
the waitress arrives to say that the bill
is on the house as a way of saying thanks
for all you do, just before the bat phone begins to ring
and the kids begin to fight about whose turn it is to
play with the toy airplane, and the identity thieves
steal Clark Kent’s name and the pirates board
another ship, before from the kitchen
there comes the scent of potatoes
burning on the stove.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gardening, hero, mother, narrator, poem, poetry, satsang, son on May 12, 2013| 8 Comments »
While digging
in the garden rows,
my son looks up
from his work
of ripping apart a clump
of roots and says to me,
Mom, how could
anything ever go wrong
with this day,
and I think,
my darling,
you teach me
so beautifully.
There are days
we forget that life
will unfold for us
if we let it.
It’s not that nothing
could go wrong.
Of course it will.
But if we are not
the heroes of our
days, rather the narrators
who notice and relate
all the events,
whether cheerful or tragic,
with equal interest,
well then even
the wrong things
are right. As it is,
he does not step
barefoot on the hoe
with its spikes
turned up nor do I
hobble to the house
with a back too sore
to stand. And the day
unfolds as some days
do, with nearly nothing
to report except the
weather—warm,
some clouds, the sun
still gaining—and
a mother and son
got the planting done.
Nothing to show for it yet
except the smile on my face
and the dirt still under
his fingernails. But I have
to admit I am glad there was
nothing painful or difficult.
And on this day, my son
is the hero of the poem.
And I can watch his mother
typing out her joy as if
I am not the same woman.
Between these two view points,
there is a garden. I walk
its rows. I bring it water.
What grows is what will grow.