for my daughter
When you were a girl
and you’d leave for camp,
I would talk to you
through the sky,
whispering through
blue and star-dappled
dark. The message
was always the same:
I love you. I hope you
are happy. I want to gather
you a jar full of sky
so wherever you are
you can put your ear
to it and hear those simple
words translated into starlight
and sunset, cumulous
and cirrus. Sometimes
it’s easier to trust what
we can hold in our hands.
But if you ever spilled
the contents of the jar,
the love would be no less
present. In fact, you could
hold the empty glass
to your chest and feel
how love is as uncontainable
as wind, as insistent as thunder,
as everywhere as air.
Posts Tagged ‘sky’
Sending Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, distance, love, mother, sky on June 12, 2026| 2 Comments »
One Practice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haikuling, resilience, sky, wings on August 11, 2025| 2 Comments »
said the fallen woman
to the indifferent sky
I am still learning to fly
One Expanding Awe
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awe, beauty, daughter, love, sky on February 2, 2025| 4 Comments »
for Vivian
when she can’t stop
falling in love with the blush of sky
I can’t stop falling in love with her
One Immensity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged certainty, immensity, mystery, sky on November 17, 2024| 9 Comments »
shrugging out of certainty
like a dress shirt too snug—
the sky fits just right
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.
One Big Perspective
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, perspective, sky on February 11, 2024| 2 Comments »
a day so blue
even my greatest fears
are dissolved into sky
Above Treeline
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged sky, spaciousness, transformation on July 23, 2023| 4 Comments »
Everywhere I turn,
the measureless sky,
wild open sky,
deep bluing,
unencumbered sky,
and how is it
it enters me
and fills my lungs
with vastness,
steeps my mind
in spaciousness,
slips immensity
into my cells,
and I, who
have been stone,
who thought I knew
something of
what a life is,
I feel myself dissolve
into blue
as if it’s the only
thing I could do.
When I leave,
the blue comes
with me.
One Inspiration
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clouds, dissolution, sky, soul on February 11, 2023| 2 Comments »
white clouds blown by wind
losing shape to become one with blue—
what a soul can do
One Attempt
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, language, loss, missing, sky on July 3, 2022| 4 Comments »
like trying to contain the sky
in the word blue—
saying I miss you
Three Months After His Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, communion, death, oneness, sky, window on November 29, 2021| 7 Comments »
Let’s say there’s a window
at the end of a long dark hall—
the more we walk toward it
the farther away it feels.
And then, let’s say, we stop
trying to get anywhere and meet
where we are. That is how
I found myself on the other side
of the window, released
into sky—blue sky, then tangerine
sky, then sky dusky pink.
That is how I found myself
talking with my son the way
we used to whenever he went
to camp—through the sky.
Only this time we didn’t talk.
We just were. Together.
I would say we were fused,
but more truly, perhaps, commingled,
as if our atoms were diffused enough
to commune. To know this
for a moment is to know it
forever—how it is that
there is no separation.
How it is that we are one.
What the Sky Knows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratefulness, grief, holding, sky on November 26, 2021| 5 Comments »
Before the feast,
I slip outside
into the rose glow
of evening and
talk to my loves
who no longer
walk this earth,
and I cry and cry,
and I thank them
for being in my life.
How is it possible
at the same time
to hold so much gratitude
and so much grief?
And the sky holds me
and the rooftops, the
streets and the fields,
the factories and forests,
it holds it all, holds
what is most beautiful,
holds what is most foul.
The sky doesn’t try to change
anything. Like that,
it seems to say
as it turns a deeper
rose. Like that.
One Expansion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged sky, spaciousness, worry on October 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »
swallowing the sky tonight—
all those enormous worries in me
now like grains of sand
Join Me?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, love, sky, tea on October 16, 2020| Leave a Comment »
One Wheeling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged comet, sky, stars on July 20, 2020| 3 Comments »
One Marvelous Evening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged happiness, sky on July 10, 2020| 4 Comments »
One Lucky
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blue, poem, poetry, sky on December 29, 2019| Leave a Comment »
One Reveal
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged light, night, poem, poetry, sky on December 20, 2019| 2 Comments »
On a Day When the Sky Is So Blue, So Clear
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, poem, poetry, sky on September 26, 2018| 2 Comments »
I imagine writing a one-line poem
long enough to reach you—
imagine how the words might quiver
in the wind, how I might climb
their serifs like a thin-runged ladder
and follow the words
to you like breadcrumbs,
like footprints, like hope.
All Night I Dreamt
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, poem, poetry, praise, sky on April 4, 2014| 1 Comment »
all night I dreamt
I was holding up the sky
so every child
could know sunshine—
is it any wonder this morning
my arms will not come down?