Her bare arms clasped the tree,
Its rugged bark pressed sharply
Against her skin.
Deep in the forest,
Tree and girl were one.
No other voice but hers
Stirred the fragrant air.
She tightened her hold
The solid roughness a biting pain
But better than the pain within.
The tree absorbed her tears
Unmoved, unchanged.
Brief moments
Separate from all others
Lessons learned from mistakes.
Where understanding
Bursts into being from light
Filtering through
Trembling leaves in a wood,
Revealing a path at last.
That pause when a choice is demanded
But not welcome or easy.
A moment of joy—
That brief dance free of the weight
Of duty and survival
Shimmers like glitter in the sky
Of a snow globe,
Catching the light,
Twirling briefly as it drifts
Down to disappear
Into the flatness that hides
That wonder until
The globe is shaken once more.
Hold me
just
hold me
the way you hold
a child
who comes
to you crying
hoping to find
love
and loving
while learning
to accept the pain.
Hold me
that I may know
there is still
love
and loving.
Pink has no more heat
Than a single candle
On a birthday cake.
Pink is fragile
As a flower petal.
Hiding
behind a crusty guardian,
Pink is new skin.
Pink is a timid color
And speaks in a voice
Very like a whisper.
In a gentler hour
Not needing to hide from light
I see truer colors
Some almost hurtful in
Their brilliance
And others whose shadings of subtlety
Are not visible
Behind tinted polarized glass.
Ah, dearest friend,
Though there are, gentle hours
When I see you
As clearly as you might wish
To be known,
It is also true
That these moments are too few
To permit a real friendship.
Your love of me is unique:
For you are my mother,
And needing you so to always be,
I most often see the woman that you are
In the shelter of a vision
Colored by your mother love
And polarized by the child in me.
An errant breeze
Whispered at the lake edge
Unseen by any
But the unforgiving moon
A single undulation
Barely a ripple
Moved outward across the lake
Then gently disappeared
Into the center of the lake’s depths
Leaving only stillness
On the tea shop shelf
A new tea to try
A tea, for once, not from Asia
Beside the sealed tin
A notice read “Limited Supply”
Naturally I accepted the challenge
And made my purchase
Before chance was gone.
Two cups later I knew
This was a great tea,
A special tea. I wanted more.
But already, there was none
Not then or even
Months later.
I saved the label,
Just in case, and
Searched the internet.
The tea came from
Fields in Africa
Ravaged by civil war.
This news brought
The sorrow of the tea’s land
Into my home
And would not let me forget.
It was indeed
A very special tea.
I walk into city streets
Which others do not see.
I play beneath Autumn leaves
smell the dust of the leaf death,
The mulch of a forest floor—
Yet few others follow me here.
I run with the circus parade,
Laugh with the clowns
And sing with the kalliope,
Though others near hear only
The whispers of their own breath.
I walk into the garret
Of desolation and despair,
Ride as with the wind
Through nights of rage.
I am slivered on the spear,
Severed upon a sword,
Gutted by all the weapons of war.
All this and more do I find
With Kandinsky and Klee,
Vincent and Pablo P.,
Chagall and Bracque,
Miro, Dali (and more)
Upon a quiet afternoon
At the Guggenheim.
There might have been
A few ashes in a dish
In a room filled with light
From another hot dry day
Miles and miles away
And the sound of a long dress
Brushing a highly polished floor
The distant echo of a horse’s hooves
Or the scream of a car’s tires
But the painter left no trace
Of that other story
Only an old wall of adobe or brick
Where time has eaten away
Bits of carefully layered paint,
A barred window revealing no interior
Only a darkness framed with stone
Stained in an upper corner,
Blackened, as if from fire
The only link to the room
With the dish of ashes
Is the shadow to one side of the window
Which might be a deadened vine
A growth of fungus
Or a fire’s ashes trapped
Against the weathered stone wall:
A shadow shaped like Africa
No, there is a clue
Though what it tells
Is left to the viewer
The painter named his work
“Drums in the Night”