I made a cage out of doom.
Thought, who am I
to change the world.
Believed that thought.
It’s not so much that
the doom dissolved,
no. It’s never been
more real. But the cage?
Just one story of just
one person who chooses
to stand up for integrity,
equality and peace
is enough to show
what one courageous
person can do.
Then the bars of that cage
bend enough for the most
courageous part of the self
to slip through. I’m not
saying it isn’t scary.
But this is how
one becomes two.
Posts Tagged ‘inspiration’
Poetic Lineage
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, inspiration, interconnection, shel silverstein on September 9, 2024| 11 Comments »
Thank you Alice Ungerer,
for raising young children
alone in Alsace
after your husband died.
It could not have been easy,
especially during the German occupation.
Hard enough to raise one child,
much less four, even when
the world is at peace.
It’s no surprise your son Tomi
grew up to write political satire
considering how the Wehrmacht
requisitioned your home.
Is it strange for me to tell you, his mother,
I’m grateful he wrote erotica, too?
Did you know? Did he tell you?
Not that I’ve read it,
just that I know this is how he met
a Jewish man who grew up
poor in Chicago, son of immigrants
who ran a bakery that failed,
a man who became a cartoonist
for an erotic magazine.
Not that I’ve seen his erotic cartoons,
but they must have caught
your son’s interest because
he urged that man, Shel,
to start drawing for kids.
For kids. An erotic cartoonist.
Can you imagine?
Your son dragged him kicking
and screaming into the office
of Ursula Nordstrom,
an editor at Harper & Row,
who thought your son was right.
And Ursula encouraged Mr. Silverstein
to make books for kids like me,
poetry books in which terrible things happened
but playfulness was always possible,
even when the little blue engine
who looked up at the hill
crashed, even when the little girl
who didn’t get her pony
died, even when the man
who fell in love with a bagpipe
ended up lonely and alone.
And because your son encouraged Shel,
I read those books and laughed
and learned that poetry was fun
and the process was full of pleasure
even when the stakes were high.
Even when I write about the girl
who didn’t think she was good enough.
Even when I write about how the whole cherry crop
was ruined in one minute by hail.
Even when I write about the woman
whose son took his life.
Oh Alice Ungerer,
dear woman I will never know,
your life is so integral to mine.
I don’t know the color
of your hair or the aches
of your heart or what made
you leap up in joy, but
your choices have touched my life
so profoundly, and I thank you
for how my sensibilities have opened
into a longing to turn
toward the dark underbelly
and find a way not just to look there
but to play. I don’t know if you
can receive this, but I thank you, dear Alice,
great grandmother of my words.
The Opening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged holiday mathis, inspiration, singing, sky, song on August 7, 2024| 5 Comments »
for Holiday, in the James Turrell Skyspace at Cheekwood Gardens
Each moment of the day
a song is looking for its singer—
song before the eyelids rise,
song of hunger, song of dream,
song of waiting for the phone to ring,
song of groping in the dark,
song of walking through the garden,
song of trying on silver hats,
song of seeing the city’s edge.
And still so often we miss the song,
but today when Holiday
opened her mouth and began
to sing of cumulonimbus,
her clear tune spiraled through the small
white room with such astonishing
rightness I brimmed with gold
and cloud and kin,
her bright-winged notes soaring
in my body like a murmuration,
and I opened like dawn, like sky,
as if when one person dares
to be found by the song of the moment
and sing it true, they teach
the rest of us how to do it, too,
how to sing, sing wild, sing
ourselves alive, as if
it’s what we’re here to do.
When It Looks Like the End
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cherry tree, growth, inspiration, mortality, stumpy, tree on April 1, 2024| 11 Comments »
for Stumpy, and maybe for you
To survive. To not only survive,
but to bring joy. To bloom despite
our own hollowing.
To bloom despite the erosion
of the world in which we grew.
I speak of a cherry tree, but
I also, perhaps, speak of you—
how you have made of your life
not just a stump, but a story.
How in hostile conditions,
despite brackish odds,
you’ve found the drive to grow.
How your words and your actions,
like cuttings, might take on a life
of their own—a legacy
of resilience that finds a home
in the soil of the lives still here.
In this way, you continue
to flourish and be known.
In this way you are not here
and ever here. Gone
and never gone. In this way
one life is a blossom that disappears
and returns on a branch not its own.
None of us live forever.
Still the chance to give the best of ourselves
away. This is how we go on.
for more information about Stumpy, the beloved cherry tree, visit here
Elegy for Laurie
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged elegy, humility, inspiration, Laurie James on September 19, 2022| 8 Comments »
“Who am I to inspire someone else and prod a good poem out of them? I don’t see myself in that light.” —Laurie James, poet, friend, performer, organizer, member of the tribe, in an interview with Eduardo Brummel, Write More Now, 2017
A cantankerous sparrow of a woman,
I imagine her rolling her eyes at death
as she lights up a cigarette and says,
“Let’s get on with it.”
A relentlessly generous bear of a woman,
already I hear rumors she’s visiting people
from the other side, asking them to dance.
She was the one who would build the nest
big enough for us all to fit.
She was the one who’d carve us a space—
carve it out of nothing, if that’s what she had—
so we could gather and rock each other’s worlds.
She was the one who knew the weight of moonlight,
the one who went from mute to muse.
She was the one with the mischievous smile,
the nomad with poems for a road.
She was the one who inspired us
to be family as we write.
She was perhaps the only one
who didn’t see herself in that light.
Inspiration
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged door, inspiration, poem, poetry on November 7, 2017| 2 Comments »
And then one day, everywhere you look,
a door, waiting for you to open it.
In the apple tree. In the parking lot.
in a blade of grass. In each stone.
Not that it appeared because you are here.
More that it always existed and now
you can see it. In the asphalt drive.
In the dotted line. In the telephone ring.
In the scent of lemon. And every door
a world you might choose to enter.
Kiss on the neck. Cloudy sky.
Magpie wing. News headline.
You can’t possibly enter them all.
Button hole. Rising bread.
Sometimes you can go back
and the door will still open. Sometimes,
even on the most familiar path,
you can never go back again.
One Not Quite Accident
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fire, inspiration, poem, poetry on September 5, 2016| 1 Comment »
Transfer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, inspiration, poem, poetry, Telluride Arts on June 27, 2016| 1 Comment »
And if you are lucky, you might stand
in the place where the horses were loaded
before they were led to look for gold, for silver.
There are journeys you, too, wish to take,
though you know now that the journeys
you long for the most are often made
by pledging yourself to a place.
The old stone walls were built with flow in mind.
Even now, they keep nothing out—not the sunlight,
not the wind, not the curve of your imagination.
And every window is an invitation
to see the same beauty framed a new way.
What might be possible here? No way to pretend
to predict the infinite. Still, this chance
to show up, to serve our own passion
in a toast to potential, and to be humbled
by our own hearts so eager to be opened.
How to Find Some Poetry in Your Life?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged find the poetry in your life, inspiration, Mesa County Public Library, poetry, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer on October 2, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Join me in Grand Junction at the library this coming Monday, at 6 p.m. for a conversation/reading/presentation as part of their ongoing “Inspiring Presentations” series. Free!
Not Only on the Fourth of July
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged firework, inspiration, poem, poetry on July 4, 2015| 4 Comments »
not once
has a firework apologized
for being so bright—
like that, I think,
live like that
No Strings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged inspiration, path, poem, poetry, road on June 23, 2015| 1 Comment »
Here, we might say, here is where
a road should be. But road there is none.
Isn’t that like us, thinking we know
the world better than the world itself.
There isn’t a road. That is clear.
And we want one. That’s clear, too.
And we don’t like the fact
there is no visible road.
Whether our intention is to run away
or to move closer to,
well, that changes, doesn’t it.
And isn’t it just like us to think
we need a road. Instead,
there is this change of light,
this scent of rain. There is
nothing we might call a path,
but there is this urge
to begin to move, this desire
that causes the legs to lift,
again and again and again,
less as if we are marionettes,
more as if there is some inner drive
more real than even the real world,
and it helps us step one more step,
one more step toward what we do not know.
Happening on the Kolb Studio While Walking the South Rim
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grand canyon, inspiration, Kolb Brothers, poem, poetry on June 11, 2015| 3 Comments »
Wearing their life vests made of cork
the Kolb brothers rowed their canvas boat
down the Colorado River.
I watched them on scratchy black and white film.
It was different then—no dams,
no crowds—only no different.
Humpback chub and pinyon jay,
mule deer and cliff rose,
ponderosa pine, white roar
of the rapids and two billion years
of geologic record.
Revelation must be passed through
with the whole body,
though the brothers were not looking
for revelation. They were looking for,
well, only they can say, and they are gone.
I did not intend to travel to their home
at the edge of the cliff,
but when I found their legend,
I felt an uplift, a collision, a drifting apart.
Is that, too, what revelation is? I swallowed
their story as if it might carve me,
undermine any harder layers
so they might collapse,
might erode me into whatever
is essential, a woman who longs
to launch herself into the flow,
no matter how flimsy
her protection, no matter
how loud, how unruly it is.
Despite all the Right Conditions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, inspiration, poem, poetry, writer's block on June 16, 2013| 4 Comments »
Some days we can’t find
the poem, at least not
the one we want to write,
the one about purple wisteria,
for instance, or the one
in which the raven appears
a sign that magic is present. Instead
the poem waits to be found
on the back of a paint sample card
or it’s cracked inside a blue glass ball.
You can glimpse it, there!
and it’s beautiful, dewy, but when
you find the pen, the poem
is as missing as the tin man’s heart.
Each time you get close,
it dives into the swimming pool,
though there is no diving allowed.
It tells you there is no happy hour
on Saturdays. It invites you to a dance party,
only you don’t have a car and it is much
too far away to walk.
For a moment, the poem was
a red tailed hawk, but the circles
it made were too high to read.
For a moment, the poem
pulled like turquoise wool
through your fingers, but then
every turquoise stitch you knit
uncounted itself and unraveled.
It is hard not to think it’s something
you’ve done. It is hard not to think
you’ve let yourself down, or even worse,
that you’ve let down the poem.
I’m here, you say, to the air, to the hawk,
to the purple wisteria blooms.
I’m here, you say to the raven, the road runner,
the blue, blue glass of the blue glass ball.
But you’re too in the way, and the more you try
the more it’s like trying to catch a cat that knows
you want to clip its claws.
And the poem slips out of the dragonfly wings
you found on the path this morning,
and it steals the silver from the nightshade leaves
beside the Rio Grande, and it walks out of the room without you.
Even it doesn’t know where it is going.
Example Haiku
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chickadee, haiku, inspiration, song on January 25, 2013| 3 Comments »
flat gray sky
the chickadee sings
no less brightly
The Second Law of Thermodynamics Gives a Pep Talk
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 84, hope, inspiration, light, poems, poetry, radiance, thermodynamics on March 3, 2012| 1 Comment »
Even the tiniest
coldest
most distant
atoms
in the universe
release
light
my dear one
it is not
so dark
*
*
This is the first in a series of 84-character poems on radiance, one of the 11 powers of the universe that Brian Swimme outlines in EnlightenNext. He writes, “In my view, the power of radiance is an expression of the mysterious way in which the universe cannot contain the magnificence it houses. Instead, it is compelled to express itself in ten million different ways.”