Tag: poetry

Sunday Poem: Morningtime by Me

Today’s poem is by me and was published by Plainsongs, a journal of Hastings College Press, last summer, 2019.

How optimistic things felt then, how wide open and expansive. This was many years ago, a whole other lifetime.

Sigh.

Morningtime

God, it is beautiful here sometimes.

When the high, hard heat sweeps across the baked pasture grass

To be tucked away at night with the setting sun;

When the first stars blink in the sky,

Light in points jumping off the river;

When the sun returns at dawn,

Shouting down the birds and waking up the lazy ants and bees;

When the rain pours a deluge,

Turning the backyard into a bog

And tattooing a steady rhythm on

The shingles and peeling painted windows;

When the blankets stir beside me

And your hand fumbles through the crumpled sheets for mine,

Quiet as a leap of faith,

In the sleepy pre-day of morningtime –

 

Before the dogs are fed and our girl is awake,

Before the insistent chatter of the alarm,

When I reach across the blankets

To meet your fingers.

 

Be well. Love each other. Wash your hands.

Sunday Poem: The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider

Smoothie still life.

I am loving this poem for a variety of reasons, and I hope you do, too.

PATIENCE OF ORDINARY THINGS

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

 

Be well, be kind, and wash your hands.

Sunday Poem: Mindful By Mary Oliver

Found on a walk – someone other than KWeeks also moves interesting pieces of wood around

My grandmother turns 102 in December. She was born during the Spanish flu, lived her teen years through the Great Depression, married a husband who left the day after they married for World War II, and is now on lockdown in an assisted living facility that has seen zero cases of COVID because they acted early and fast. She is lonely but resigned and waiting patiently for the pall to lift.

This poem today is for her. I think she might think it was pretty but not go much farther than that. My wish for her, as a person whose time on earth is closer its end than its beginning, is that she might be able at some point in the remainder of her life, see or hear something that kills her with delight.

Obvi, not literally. Good lord.

Mindful by Mary Oliver

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Sunday Poetry

Photo credit: me, of one of the iterations of The Quiet Show, by KWeeks, who is also featured below.

So I put a lovely poem up here last Sunday, and I thought I would continue, only this time with one of my own.

This was published in February in Put Into Words, My Love: Poetry & Prose: A Petite Pomme. This little journal (available on Amazon) is the second publication from Pomme Journal, and it is a pocket-sized compendium of poems about love. Each poem is accompanied by a simple line drawing, and the book is beautiful.

Here is my contribution.

Tracts of longing

And I am loving you in this morning’s rainy strangeness,
Filled as it is with dark clouds and sunshine,
Both.

Birdsongs at 5 a.m.
And the dawn chorus of your upstairs neighbor’s footsteps,
Too early.

Your skin cool above the covers and warm below,
Fuzzy blanket and flannel sheets
Tangled around our legs
Tangled around each other.

Soon you will rise and make
Coffee sounds.
Leaving sounds.

And this lovingness of ours will linger,
In the sweetness of our scents,
Mingled in the bed,
And the way my heart’s longing reaches yours,
Even as we part.

Someday I’ll Love by Ocean Vuong

Five Layers, 2019

This is all you need today – the sudden beauty of a simple poem.

After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.