I
Haiku careful words
Irreverent with laughter
Sunshine in Winter
II
When I was broken
With Issa I laughed, smiled
Brief thaws in Winter
III
With frozen fingers
Spring rain fell Winter chilled
Issa, too, had tears
#poetrymonth
He was a poet
Who held his poems
Within
Yet poetic was the silence
Rippling through the air
Through which he passed
Poetry sang in the veins
Of those he touched
He was a poet
Who held his poetry
Within
And we have become
The poems he never spoke
#dayofsilence
#poetrymonth
A pen to dance?
To twirl and prance
Spinning into arabesque
And pirouette
Gliding over the tracery
The delicate filigree
The perfectly tatted lace
A net to catch and hold
To shape and mold
The sound and sense
That is the essence of poetry?
Ah, no. Not today
Not yesterday.
Nor even perhaps tomorrow.
#poetrymonth
Say No and face
The consequences
The shunning
The frowning faces
Turned shoulders
Say No
And back away
From the screaming
Anger bouncing
Off your skin
Hurting your ears
Making your stomach churn
Say No
And the burden
Is released
The imposed duty
No longer pressuring you
Say No
As a child does
To define boundaries
A way to discover self
Say No
To be true
To who you are
Not hiding
In shadows
In silence
Yes is too easy
Say No
Each petal of this rose
Has a tale to tell—
Each as different as those related
By witnesses of a scene or a life.
There will be stories of youth
Breaking from within the greened womb
And of the fading and weight of age;
Legends of the buffetings of fate,
Of visitors from afar, of marauders
Seeking the rose’s treasures
And sharing their own stories
Of hunger, danger and duty,
Each leaving behind
In the wreckage they had wrought
Grains of dust from far off places
Which carved imprints of their histories
In hidden, vulnerable places.
This rose will surely describe
Hot days thick with heady perfume
Cool nights when fragrance,
Merely teased the air,
Odes of glory, elegies of woe,
(perhaps an idyll of dreams?)
But strongest of all
The lyric joy of life.
If only we could hear
The separate voices
Or read the messages
Written in the flesh,
We might finally know why
This rose came to be lying here,
Abandoned and alone,
On the cooling wetness of sand
As the late afternoon tide rolls in.
Ripped from its mother plant
Thrust into unprepared clay-rich soil
The geranium persisted,
Grew without nurture.
But its blooms were few
And nearly hidden
Among its own leaves—
Brief flares of red-orange fire
Within a green surround
Spreading broad leaves
Over the garden corner edging
Onto converging paths.
Ruthlessly cut back
For passing feet,
The geranium compensated
Growing tall, high above
Its neighboring plants.
More blooms appeared
Some bursting upward
As if to touch the sky,
Then the storm came
Whipping the trees
From side to side
Before the rain descended
Like Niagara escaped from capture,
Followed by the pitiless
Pelting of ice pellets….
When the morning sun shone
Down on that garden corner
The geranium lay sprawled
Once more across the paths.
Yet its once skyward blooms
Shot their fire still
Defiant and strong
With a promise to rise again
In fire to reach the sky.
Before she first heard
The Oreo® cookie’s name spat
Like an insult
Before she even understood
How or why it could
Fill the air with acid crumbs
That burned and stung,
The name was just a cookie
And not a favorite.
She preferred Hydrox®
Which were less bitter,
Their center more moist.
This vanilla wafer girl
Who spoke out in innocence
To claim equal humanity
For a race not her own,
Before she knew there might be
A penalty for her innocence,
After, shunned
But not banished,
A vanilla slightly scorched
To a hurt of butterscotch,
She survived quietly
Though always watched
In the light of fires
That flashed through the sixties.
Much later in poems of recollection
In the voice of two races
She spoke aloud once more
But she was stunned
When a friend of the other race
Suddenly smiled and said,
“I can explain you now.
You’re chocolate inside.”
It was an honor
The vanilla girl never expected
Or even thought she’d earned –
To be the opposite of an Oreo.
Searing soul and body
The burning acid churns
Seeking out corners of the mind
To scald, inflame and scar,
And yet the remedy is so plain,
So simple, so obvious.
Why do we resist?
Why hug this pain to our chest
Refusing to let it go?
Why nurture this ugly ulcer within?
Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.
#nationaloldstuffday
With the light kiss
And stealth of an ocean fog
Silence takes possession of my house
Buries the noise of day.
The heavy quiet crouches
Down for the length
Of this night.
Loneliness—completely at ease,
Lounges against the stairs,
My childhood friend
Waiting to walk with me again
Hand in hand into the familiarity
Of meeting old friends…and enemies.
In this empty time thoughts wander
Backward
Toward a spiral of sounds—
Voices
From a distance so far
They can only be an echo
Of what was.
And the hunger awakes.
Still the silence
Lays its quiet all around.
While undirected anger
Whips wildly at random.
Sorrow, anger and pity
Circle, spinning
In a cyclone-like vortex
With silence at its core
Creating the void
Where the unclosing eye
Captures, sums and scatters
All the unconscious reveals.
And though the unprotected heart
Flinches as from rope burn stings,
The miraculous balm
Of uncaged, unbounded joy
Spills its liquidity
Of unspecific love over all.
#wordlquietday
One odd you-shaped piece of perfection
Isn’t that the dream –
To catch the perfect
To hold it long enough for others to know
The hope of a truth nearly within our reach?
Oh, yes, I think we agree it just might be enough
To justify a lonely, dissected life
The broken heart.
Go for that bit of immortality
For just that one odd
You-shaped
Piece of perfection.
#singleawarenessday