Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, fairies, mother, poem, poetry, purpose, river, rocks on November 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Hundreds of smooth red stones—
we gathered them that summer
and spent days carefully laying them out
into a wide and winding red path.
It had no real starting point, no destination.
We tucked white daisies between the rocks.
We said it was for the fairies.
I wouldn’t have said it then, in fact,
I hesitate today to say we didn’t believe in them.
They gave us so much purpose.
Even now, I’m following that path.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, humanness, mother, parenting, poem, poetry, strength on November 3, 2019| 4 Comments »
It surprises me she is fragile,
this woman who labored for eighteen hours
to birth me, this woman who cared for me
every time I was sick, who coached
my soccer team, who led my Girl Scout troupe.
This woman who went hunting and fishing
and still often comes home with the biggest
catch. This woman who walked ten miles
to raise money for hunger. This woman
who prays for everyone, everyone.
And so tonight when I walk her
to her room and she needs to stop
a moment to catch her breath,
I marvel at how human she is,
this woman who has been more
than human to me my whole life—
a super hero, a champion, a star.
And somehow, knowing this, and
understanding that it’s been true all along,
I fall even more deeply in love with her
as she leans back on the bed, lets out
a long sigh, closes her eyes, and smiles.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cooking, daughter, kitchen, love, mother, parenting, poem, poetry on August 31, 2019| 2 Comments »
First, you must weigh everything.
Precisely. The butter. The water.
The sugar, the salt. You must
catch the mixture just as it boils,
then add the flour, sifted and weighed.
You must set the timer to dry the dough,
must add the eggs slowly, must not
let it be too dry, too wet.
There’s more, my friends. The angle
of the pastry sleeve, must be 45 degrees.
You need to use the French star tip.
And then, you must not open the oven
lest the steam escapes and the eclairs
don’t crust. So many musts. So many dos.
And still they don’t always turn out.
It is not at all the way I love you. Though
sometimes I’ve tried to find the recipe.
Though sometimes I’ve wished it
were as easy as measuring well and using
a timer. I have wanted to do it right.
I have studiously wanted to make yours the best life.
But the only way to be a good lover
is to love. It has nothing to do
with following directions. Has
everything to do with the doing.
Like making choux pastry dough
together. Taking turns at the stove.
Reading the directions out loud to each other,
four times. And then watching the dough,
astonished as it goes from slimy to smooth
to something sturdy that shines.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, flowers, help, helplessness, medicine, mother, poem, poetry on July 23, 2019| 5 Comments »
Because I cannot fix her heart,
I plant flowers in the two empty pots
on my mother’s high rise patio.
She’s always loved flowers around the house—
peonies and petunias in Wisconsin,
succulents and larkspur in Colorado.
She taught me when I was a girl
how to deadhead the plants
to produce more blooms,
how to make the snapdragon
open its reptilian mouth, how
to tell the story of Cinderella
by carefully dissecting the bleeding heart,
how to make touch me nots spit their seeds,
and how a few flowers around the home
bring immeasurable joy. And so
I pick out white and blue lobelia and
a soft gray vine and a hot pink begonia
and other flowers and vines I can’t name
and we sit on her patio together
in the late afternoon sun
and arrange the potted plants.
There is something about planting flowers
together that changes the way
you see the flowers—the same way
a soup tastes better when made
by someone who loves you—
and I thrill to think of her
looking out the window and seeing
the bright red geraniums surrounded
by purples and blues and greens
and thinking to herself, wow,
that girl really loves me, and
surely, surely, though it won’t
fix her heart, surely it will do some good,
those draping pink petunias
so familiar, so new.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, father, hospital, icu, love, mother, parents, poem, poetry on July 21, 2019| 4 Comments »
And as my mother steeped toward slumber,
her thin body wired to monitors,
there, surrounded by incessant beeping
and the red and green mountains and valleys
of pulse and pressure and the slow drip
of IV tubes finding her veins, yes,
there as her speech became mumbly and her
eye lids heavied, my father leaned over
the rails of the hospital bed to smooth
her gray hair and kiss her lips and whisper
I love you. And she rallied a smile and
whispered it back. And there, in the sterile room,
with all its instruments of cardiac measurement,
there was nothing, nothing that could chart
how open my heart, how—unable to hold
all the love I felt for them both—it broke
in the most beautiful way. How I prayed
it would stay that open, that broken, that whole.
**
Dear friends, thank you for all your good wishes. After having a heart surgery go wrong a few days ago, my mother was released today from the ICU and is now resting at home, and though she is not out of the woods yet, she is not in imminent danger. It’s been very scary and I thank you for all your thoughtful messages and prayers and thoughts. Rosemerry
*
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airport, kindness, mother, poem, poetry, strangers, tenderness, travel on July 20, 2019| 10 Comments »
I wonder who else today
in Concourse A
is traveling to see their mom
in the hospital, who else
has a parent with a surgery
gone wrong? Who else
could use some tenderness—
perhaps that woman in green
on the transporter? Or maybe
the young mother chasing her child
on the moving walkway? Or
the middle-aged man deliberating
over snacks? Today, it seems
so obvious that all of us
need some tenderness—
regardless our story.
And so when the man
in 31 C offers to lift my suitcase
and fit it somehow
into the overhead bin,
I almost weep with relief,
but instead I smile and say
Thank you, yes, I need help.
All day, I think of how
one small generosity changes
the landscape of the heart.
All day, I am met with chances
to be grateful, to be kind.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bedtime, mother, parenting, poem, poetry, time on June 16, 2019| 2 Comments »
Stepping into my children’s room
it is nine years ago and I almost trip over
the rocking chair that isn’t there,
can almost smell the calendula cream
I used for their bottoms, hear
the drone of the humidifier.
How different those quiet nights,
the amber glow of the night light,
the way their new bodies curled
so easily into the curve of my arm.
Not that I want to go back to those nights,
but how sweet they are now, how long
they were then. I want to tell that younger
version of myself that there will come
a day when she will wish she could
sit in the quiet and hold her children
through the night. But she wouldn’t believe me.
Too tired for belief. She just keeps
humming that lullaby, rocking back
and forth, her eyes closed as if to dream.
Dear friends, I’ll be camping the next few days, so no poems posted for a while … a bouquet when I return. xo
r
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, mother, poem, poetry, road trip, singing on June 10, 2019| 3 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, flowers, lost, mother, poem, poetry, road on June 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Beside the dirt road
we find a whole bouquet’s worth
of purple penstemon,
pink wild roses, orange
globe mallow, and countless
yellow weeds. My daughter
picks them, a bride to joy,
and though there is thunder
it doesn’t rain, except for petals,
yellow sweet clover, that
she sprinkles along the dirt
to leave a trail behind us,
just in case we get lost, Mom.
she says. Sometimes love
seems to rise right out of the dirt
and damned if somehow
on that one-way road
I didn’t get wholly, beautifully,
heart breakingly lost.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged colic, mother, parenting, poem, poetry, son on May 27, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I suppose by then I had guessed
that love was not only about happiness,
not only about ease and feeling good.
In fact, it turned out as the newborn boy
continued to cry for month after
inconsolable month, love looked
a lot like misery. It sounded like wailing
through all his waking hours.
It felt like exhaustion. Love looked
like losing a dream. And choosing
to cradle the infant anyway. And soothing
the wailing infant anyway. Love
had little to do with happiness.
And eventually the crying stopped. And
the boy learned to laugh. And to
hug. And to love. And happiness came.
And went. And came. And went. But love,
love stayed. Like a jay that comes
to the feeder and refuses to leave,
even if you don’t put out seed.
Like the freckle that stays on the skin
long after the burn from the sun.
Like the scar on your elbow shaped like a heart
that you got from falling in gravel. How it took
so long to heal. How you pray it never fades.
