Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ferocity, praise, self awareness, wind on November 18, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Today when the wind
wrests branches from trees,
cartwheels the watering can
snatches my peace,
I search in me
for a way to praise it,
praise a force strong enough
to rip trees from the earth,
push a ship cross the sea,
and shred what I think I know.
There is in me
a vehement storm
that I have tamed
for fifty years.
Is it any wonder
the wind makes me nervous—
not that I don’t know
how to relate to it,
but oh, because
I do.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, self awareness, theater on April 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
She watched herself on stage,
and though she wept for the sad parts,
she didn’t wish them away—
they made the story better.
She easily laughed every time she forgot her lines.
And several times, though the play wasn’t done,
she gave herself an ovation.
Why not, she thought. I’m doing
a damn good job up there.
I wonder what took me so long
to see I got the lead. I can’t wait to see
where this play is going.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eclipse, poem, poetry, self awareness on January 21, 2019| 2 Comments »
strange, the light disappearing
stranger still to realize
we are the ones in the way
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, mother, poem, poetry, self awareness, Wrinkle in Time on March 25, 2018| Leave a Comment »
If you could come back, I say, as anyone else
in the world—say you just stepped out of time
for a moment and then came back in—would
you come back as yourself or as someone else?
We are driving in the dark, but I know from experience
that we have just crossed the Dallas Divide
and there are mountains just south of us, and
Leopard Creek to our left, already slightly swollen with spring.
Well, she says, after some consideration, could
I change parts of myself? And I say, No.
You get to come back exactly as yourself.
The car in the oncoming lane forgets to lower its brights.
Then I would come back as myself, she says,
and I feel a flood of fragrant joy in her answer,
a perfume that fills the car with the heady
scent of self-awareness. I think of the infinite
choices and events that conspired to make her
exactly this girl who in this exact moment
chooses to be exactly herself. Except, she says.
I wish I could be better organized.
All around us, the world unbraids itself,
melting and charged with mud and change.
All around us, a fine and untamable chaos.
Inside us, the exact person to meet it.