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I see the world
now upside down
not right side up
but back to front;
I know not what
to make of it.
Winter storms
cast ground asunder,
summers roast us
raw and still,
we do not see.
When will we grasp
the nettle?
Suffer the sting,
for the balm
of the tea?
STK
Water spills from the hose,
bending the last light of the day as it caresses each new leaf and bud.
Another day is drawing to a close.
The woods come alive with the tiny sparks of fireflies
and the frogs screech their nightly lullabye.
Dirt and mud under my fingernails
are a permanent tattoo of these long, summer days.
My patience grows like the tender new plants rooted in the earth.
I unfold in the natural of here.
DS
It is true I am with you,
in the here and the now,
and the hand, that you hold,
tethers me to you.
And I hear, when we walk,
you keeping step, with my breath,
as each tread plants feet
firmer, in our story.
But mine is a heart
with a languid selfish want
and will not yield
to my insistence
in the present.
And so I listen
in the quiet,
to the thrum
that holds me steady —
to the echo of
hearts beating,
in two places.
STK
Smoke from an extinguished fire wafts upward
marking the separation between incident and aftermath.
Cell memory is a powerful force,
and the unresolved lingers deep.
But I find my empty spaces filling again,
like rainfall seeping into the parched earth.
My consciousness is pierced by the medley of birdsong,
It's time to begin again.
DS
Late spring and the buds
hold tight onto
their secrets, nestling
in the umber
and the green.
The rain in May
leaves dewy drops
that linger on the leaves,
like a promise.
Later, petals dance,
like children
waving hankies
in the wind;
surrendering their moment,
before they fall.
Their scent hangs
heavy in the air —
odiferous and languid.
Long after summers end,
when days draw slow and
fingers red and raw
dawdle in the woodsmoke;
I’ll trace with love the rosy dust,
that talisman of time’s
ruthless passing.
And beholding you,
I’ll hold you,
closer still.
STK
As light as a kiss
was his touch
on her arm,
where the hair on her skin
rose to greet him.
In her dreams
she would trace
the lines of his face,
like a map
to a country she’d
forgotten.
Memory lives
in the blood,
like the pulse
of the river,
forever flowing forward
from the source.
Dawn sent me a prompt the other week, about vulnerability. And ruefully I felt I was feeling too vulnerable to write about it. It’s a common thing, I know, this business of removing small lesions as we age. A tactile war against the microagressions of invisible intruders. But it didn’t feel so minor, as I could barely contemplate the carnage without fainting. We all have this vision of ourselves, don’t we? An idea of who we are, and once in a while it shreds, before our very eyes, this fiction of our invulnerability. We look and see everything that is to come and it takes our breath away.
A Small Moment Noticed
Light and shadows dance across the back of
my tightly closed eyelids
warmed by the sun;
mesmerized by their dancing patterns,
my body feels alive and I am reverent
in this small moment noticed
as the world roars by.
DS
when exactly does a beginning start? is it an internal shift? or is it forced upon us abruptly….without an invitation but there anyway, upping the ante to begin something new?
i don’t make friends with beginnings easily. i tend to walk in the wounds of my past much too often to embrace a begininning without a certain amount of distrust. i want beginnings to prove themselves. it’s an awkward relationship. i’ve built new beginnings from the ashes of past situations many times. i’m somewhat good at that. but for me, there is no shiny coin of possibilities at the bottom of the rubble. just the tarnished and sacred talismans from history gone by. i hold them tenderly… my ever present struggle of deciding which to take and which to leave behind.
She waits and watches
the shadows,
making animals
dance,
with only her hands.
She pauses
at the threshold,
where hesitancy
lingers.
Her foot hovers,
like a cat’s paw
on the snow,
testing the
temperature,
before falling.
STK
The calendar year has turned a page
but i am still
suspended;
slowly turning in an unfamiliar circle,
while maneuvering through these changes which I now possess
and of which
possess me.
They say that hindsight is 2020,
but I am still blind in that sacred space between heart and head,
feeling my way through
this new landscape of loss.
DS
Knowledge, is a stubborn thing,
it holds fast in the shadows
and even, as perspective shifts,
still shimmers in the witchy light
of falsehood.
Stories buried deep, are told
in the lore of a family’s choosing,
a narrative thread,
from mother to daughter,
then daughter to child,
writ large upon a lifetime.
In stony ground
we grow slant.
Even the most tender,
emerging with such vigor,
devoid of sunlight,
will wilt, turn sallow.
Illumination then.
I’ll hold those roots, but
seek the sun,
unfaltering in my telling.
I’ll lay my secrets in the grass,
like a bird drying its wings
after the rain.
STK
Standing from afar,
I now realize
that all of those hopelessly tangled moments have formed patterns.
Recognizing them now,
when just weeks ago
they were barriers.
I now know what I see,
and I see what I know.
Such is this gift of understanding.
Beyond the fence,
the seeds that were sown have all grown into miracles.
DS
These last few
leaves, like heavy drops
of dewy rain,
hang fast on to
the last sad days
of Fall.
And in the past,
the beat of hearts
too small to see,
were carried,
on the wing
of a thousand breezes.
A miracle, each year,
it comes around
to bless
our harvest.
But now we keen,
and mourn its passing song.
STK
feelings too big to be felt
mistaken for
unexpressed emotions lying dormant like a ticking bomb
i didn’t recognize your distress signal,
only what i thought was the decay of indifference.
it only takes ninety seconds for an emotion to travel through the nervous system
but i swear i felt the significance of you
craving connection
while standing on that dusty, hardened ground.
DS
There’s a shift
in the sheet
where your head
used to lie.
And in the nap,
of that thread,
lies the memory
of you.
You can’t see,
if you don’t look,
so I do and I feel you,
in the warp
and the weft,
of the fabric
of my day.
STK
i am a house
with walls that pulse with the energy of a thousand moments.
standing witness to the uncertainties
that fill the empty silence.
mourning the separation,
and searching for the resolution between two states,
of dream and reality,
the bend of physicality.
startled by the headlines,
tossing in my sleep,
my body taut with the intensity of each word.
there’s no way to be neutral about these days,
you choose your house, and i’ll choose mine.
but we’re all looking through curved lines at the distorted intersections
between what we see,
and what we long to see.
DS
There is a place that I know,
where the moon tilts
off the water,
like a saucer
of milk,
in the inky dark.
It is there that I come,
to hold myself still,
and run my thoughtless hands
through troubled currents,
of remembrance.
And it is there,
in the silky depths,
I feel my feet,
sink in the silt,
searching for the echo
of myself.
STK
we become lost and found over and over again
in the time bending moments of any given day.
playing an endless game of hide and seek.
with splintered attention.
should we even bother to try and hold together the hundreds of tiny shards
of each day as it cracks open?
or learn how to be still as
the in betweens and underneaths
wrap around us.
the infinite churn.
DS
Tension sits, between
thought and action,
arrow and target,
between the fist,
and the fight.
And though it seems
the world is hiding/waiting
tis not silently surrendered,
but just
still.
I know the seeds are stirring;
that this is no absence really,
but a waiting pent up urging,
as we gather,
for the flight.
STK