Poetry Friday: Something There Is That Loves A Fence

Poetry never seems to really leave me alone, not that I am asking it to...but I don't exactly beg it to stay either. I haven't written a Poetry Friday post for some time and yet when I planned today that I would join in again and post something up I had about four or five ideas for poems come zinging into my consciousness. I would never self-identify as a poet but I do love a good poem and I seem to have a lot of poems rattling around in me trying to get out.

Poetry Friday is being hosted today by Poetry For Children and I am thrilled to join in again! Check out the other contributions. Happy Summer!

Today I am sharing a poem about our California backyard. This is our first yard with a genuine privacy fence and I have to say that I love it, the privacy and the peeking over and through it to talk to the neighbors. Its amazing how much I think of Frost's poem and chuckle.

Privacy Fence
I walk the high board fence between our yards
Escorting the black hose the length of the flower bed
Hissing fallen petals, shed leaves and dust ahead of us.
Your glory vine is pushing fingers through the planks,
Spying at my boys as they lounge in the hammock
My leadwort is getting positively coquettish,
Throwing its sky blue tresses clear over the wall.
In your direction.
Neither of us mind.
You peek at me through the slits in the boards grinning
Passing bags of Cambodian shrimp chips over to us
Or dropping candy bars to my jazzed 6 year old
I bow and wave and wish you a good day
Sometimes sending over a bouquet of mint
Or a few choice stems of rose blossom
And over us, your banana cluster ripens benevolently
While my passiflora vine tenderly creeps up
Into the arms of your apple tree.

Poetry Friday: A Piece About Perspective

Happy Poetry Friday! Its been a long time since I participated but I'm back in the saddle, summer fueling my creative side. Today is the day I share an original poem, hopefully one I made up just today and join in with other poets and poetry lovers to share our work and the work of those we admire. Today our host for Poetry Friday is Mitchell Linda over at A Word Edgewise. Go take your morning cup of coffee over tomorrow and glide through all the stacks of wonderful poems. Such a great way to open your mind for the weekend and to take it all out and shake out the wrinkles before a new week begins. 

This week I am sharing a poem that was begotten via a poetry prompt from our hostess. Thank you so much for the beautiful first line, Mitchell Linda... This took me happy places. I was thinking of the very common scene in my backyard with my four little boys playing together and losing things together over the garage roof or over the fence to the neighboring yards. Lots of great images and meaning layers there if we look at even the simple and mundane scenes in our lives.  

Above Ground

"Don’t worry—there are ladders."
He told his little brother after they
Sailed a balsa glider quite out of reach
Onto the garage roof.  

He was just deflating, melting into a
Puddle of heartbreak on the sidewalk,
his kindergarten joy sailing out of reach
Onto the garage roof. 

His big brother lifted his chin with a finger,
And gave a wink towards the rungs
And pulled his hopes upright again
Onto the garage roof. 

How many times I could have rallied
If I could only learn to look up myself.
Remembering that there are ladders
Onto the garage roof.

Poetry Friday: Three Kings, One Mama and A Poem

Today is a good day to have a brilliant idea. Its Epiphany and Poetry Friday! Today is the final day of Christmas, which in our house means we celebrate by taking down the holiday decorations, putting the house back to order and moving on....but it also means that I want to take the time to actually mark Epiphany itself as a meaningful day, not just as a day to end the meaning. Three Kings Day is when we remember that the Christ child was not just for Bethlehem but for the far-flung world, he was visited by these kings who came from some mysterious,  far-off, not Jewish land.....summoned by stars and irresistible telegraph messages from the sky. Epiphany is a day when we remember the appearing of this celestial "idea" in the sky, the appearing of Christ to the far nations of the world and the appearing of these kings as guests of The Holy Family.

Its a day to celebrate light, as we remember the star that called for inclusion, and Christ who is named Light of the World. We will light our Advent wreath one last time and we will light luminaries outside our door too. Its a day to celebrate guests and remember the role that these strangers had in the story and the part that warmly welcoming them played as The Holy Family opened their door to them and brought them into their house and life. We will chalk our door tonight with a holy blessing for our home and all who come in and go out in 2017. Chalking the door also echoes back to Passover and the many Jewish parents who marked their doors with a sign of protection on that important night. We will also have an apple gallette with a bean hidden in it....that lucky person getting to wear the crown around the house for the rest of the evening, just for fun. And we'll sing a few more carols around the piano and making sure to hit We Three Kings. I'll read the story of the magi's visit at bedtime as fodder for sweet dreams and we'll be off and running towards our New Year, kissing the holiday season goodbye and looking on towards Lent.

I love the church calendar, the way it pulls me into history, the way it marks our whirling round and round and ties our revolutions into sacred time. I love the reminders to tell these stories to my children, to focus on things like blessing our home and remembering light in our lives. I love the cultural habits that bring gentle little traditions to our life and maybe even a sense of who our people are ancestrally.

Epiphany Song

On this day of eureka,
Bright ideas, lit by starlight
Infuse amongst us like
The fragrant smoke of incense
Let us know clearly.
There is an open door with a
Blessing sifting onto the heads
That enter, like chalk dust
Filtering down in a beam of sun,
Let us love each soul.
We look for the exotic among us,
The sage voices of other lands,
People baring their hearts of gold
Hands fragrant with scents of love.
Let us seek freshness.

The prettiest pastry we ate this year, inspiration for our Epiphany pastry!

Enjoy the collection of other poetry contributions, some original and some inspiration from greats at our host site this week Teacher Dance.

Poetry Friday: A Morning Poem

Happy Poetry Friday.....on Saturday in the wee hours.

I was out late with lady friends and am just now getting home, with an insistent poem forming on the tip of my tongue. So, here I am. Happy Weekend! Happy Poetry!

Poetry Friday is a group of poem sharers and authors who take turns making a giant leaf pile of verse to jump into with your warm coffee mug on Saturday or Sunday morning. Everyone pitches in poems that they love or poems they have written and someone takes a turn hosting the list of collected links and together we make a beautiful, literary village. I love the inspiration of being "around" other creators, I love the accountability of a place to share my stuff and a scheduled time for having something ready, I love also love the interest there is in reading through all these ideas and styles and eras of writing. I've read poems in this group which have left me dumb and deeply moved and poems that have made me laugh out loud. I sometimes share the ones for children with my boys and I often bookmark some to come back to or send them off to someone I think will enjoy that particular piece.

Have a gander....its a lovely kind of festival to wander through. This week our host is Brenda Davis Harsham who writes at Friendly Fairy Tales.

Morning Lark

She drooped over her water glass
On the bar between us.
9 o'clock was a limit.
It was pointless to sit awake on
Dark winter nights, cotton-headed
And dull, when there was only t.v.
To be conscious for.
9 o'clock was the end.
She'd rather be up at crisp o'clock
The world glittering at her feet
The cotton of the night before
Lifting off into the pale, clear sky.
There would be hot coffee
Running in holy rivulets off her desk
And a To Do List of sparkling assignments
Snapping at her saucily,
Her bright feet high-stepping
The jig between laundry and kitchen
No drooping in sight.

Poetry Friday: A Poem About When They Met

Happy Poetry Friday! Man, has it ever been a long time! I am sharing a small,original poem today about a couple I know, first finding each other. Love is no respecter of schedules or personal reservations, that's partly what is so wonderful about it. It has this capacity to sweep us out of our limits and logic and there is a great beauty and power there.

Here's to those who love us and love each other....

Smitten In Northern Michigan

He had hair like last summer's beach grass,
Pale, joy-pinched blue eyes and skin
Like the warm sweep of a sand dune.
He wore flannels and worn jeans and
A smile like the unclouded sun.
He drove a pick-up with doors that fell off.
And she wondered why she felt like a living meteor.


Happy Weekend friends! Hope Saturday finds you with a tall iced coffee and a lazy morning start so that you can head over to our host site, A Year Of Reading, for Poetry Friday and check out all the other contributions this week. People share all kinds of stuff, their thoughts on new poems they just found, favorite poems they admire and also original work (which is my personal goal). To read the rest of my poems from previous Poetry Fridays....check out the tab at the top of the page labeled "Original Verse" and have a gander through the accumulating pile.

Poetry Friday: A Family Link, In Verse

Happy Poetry Friday! Its the weekend y'all and we made it all the way across the line. Having a little Flashback Friday moment tonight, not enough inspiration or time tonight to pen a poem of my own and so, I'm sharing a great one by Jacqueline Woodson about family.

My parents and I and my first baby sister Jen, sometime in 1984.

I feel increasingly connected to mine as I age, as my boys grow bigger and form their own connections, as I research my family tree, consider my genetic testing I got for Christmas this year and soak into my new life so very far across the country. I'm lucky, I have a wonky, bumpy, lovely family full of grit and jokes, woodsmoke, doubt and other delicious things. They are wonderful people all of them and I am working on sorting out who I am in relation to them and who I am not in relation to them, but no matter who I turn out to be, I know I will belong. I am part of these crazy people and they are part of me. Its a strong thing to feel that internal wire, stringing you all together irreversibly. May the cable never sever.

My parents and I, December 2015.

Here's my contribution to Poetry Friday this week. Enjoy.

genetics

BY JACQUELINE WOODSON

My mother has a gap between

her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar.

Each child in this family has the same space

connecting us.

Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust.

His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop

people on the street.

Whose angel child is this? they want to know.

When I say, My brother, the people

wear doubt

thick as a cape

until we smile

and the cape falls.

Catch the rest of the submissions this week at The Miss Rhumphius Effect, click over and have a marinade.

Poetry Friday: Secret Apple Code

Happy Poetry Friday to you all! Its late at night and the house is quiet....I have had a dreamy day out with some of the best company and have wakened my mind up in a redwood forest. Its a good night for a poem and even though this one came dragged out of me in a tangled fashion, I hope it will be worth sharing with others. I liked listening to my brain stumble through the meanings and the unsnarling of the steps of the story. 

I forget how much writing poetry can feel just like meditation, like painting and like yoga when I sink in properly. Its best done in a dark house after everyone has gone to sleep, I think. You can finally get into the thick and flowing weight of the process if you have no voices left, no other presence and no one but you, even your physical self snoozing in the computer chair really while your brain and your soul work macrame with ideas and thoughts and personal truth. This is why I mean to read poetry and mean to write it. 

This week, a poem about the story of this beautiful little apple and how it came to be mine and how in the world despite its stunning beauty, I managed to have it disappoint me. 

An Apple Lesson

I wanted it to be most sweet, a tangy, juicy pleasure

Instead it punched me bitterly, a plug of sour, drying feathers. 

It was the largest on the tree, its skin all pinkly blushing

The freckles on its spherical cheek all winking at me flushly.

The children playing squirrel games had buried all the others 

A row of mole-hills neatly made, with marble apples under.

I noticed all their digging work, each stick that marked a pile. 

I heard the secret offerings arranged for deer in sylvan style. 

The meaning of each twig and heap, the messages spelled out

When every plan had been described, oblations all laid out

I told them if I was a doe, I'd be most grateful to them each

And have a secret thrill to find their message and the treats. 

Attention is a cheerful gift, a momentary pleasure

A child who is listened to grows dignified and tender

Because I entered in their world, my fingers in the dirt

My head inclined and face awake, my spirit in the work

They paused and then behind a back emerged this largest pome

The rusted ruby biggest fruit, unburied and alone

They gave it to me as a gift, a gesture peer to peer.

Their largest apple never laid in sacred mounds for deer.

I thanked the little architects who'd shared their schemes with me

And made a circuit through the park, a gleeful apple posessee

I cupped it in my hand and tossed and felt its weighty cool

With glittering eyes I breathed and rubbed it to a ruddy yule. 

The tartan flannel of my shirt my regal buffing cloth

My lucky apple, sparking bright, held vampishly aloft. 

Alas, this prize of children and my adultish greedy yen 

Had a jolting oral skirmish when I bit into the skin.

Not every beauty that we find is there to be consumed. 

Some gifts are handheld sermons made of eloquent festoons. 

Our Poetry Friday roundup being hosted this week by The Miss Rhumphius Effect. Please join in or read along any week that the urge strikes you, this friendly group of poets and poetry lovers has no limits or rules about participation and has been so welcoming to me. Please come along if you like!

Poetry Friday: A Moving Tribute

Happy Poetry Friday! I have a poem this week, digesting a bit more about my move to The West Coast from The East Coast.

Its been about 2,000 years since I had a good poetic wander. Feels so good to get back to my principles and be stepping back into a rhythmn of creation and personal, reflective thought. Love writing poetry.

Poetry Friday is a product of KidLitosphere and is a chance to share and mingle together suggestions, original work and sometimes even whole books that feed that poetry section of our brains, help us to think in lyrical form and assist in giving us imagery that is crisp and reflective of experience.

I try to write an original poem once a week to participate, pushing myself to try new ideas and to capture in verse the impressions that slam or waltz through my mind. See the tab above for a collection of all the poems I've spun out thus far here.

Poetry Friday is one of my favorite things to consume on a lazy Saturday or Sunday morning. A mug of tea and the host list of links is great early morning brain food to help your inner self uncurl and blink awake. So, incredibly cozy. Try it out.

Our host blog this week is Poetry For Children. Click through and enjoy all the offerings!




New To California

I am camping in a house with a blow-up mattress, four boys and a sea of pale gray carpet.

I wonder what dark January looks like with prickly pear ripening on the side of the freeway and mariachi on the radio.

I hear basketball echoes in the back courtyard, the neighbor kids shouting in Spanish and the gentle hum of the refrigerator in our tiled kitchen.

I see the golden sunlight slanting through the office blinds and the sly Dirt Devil doing the tango along the living room wall.

I want new girlfriends,
luscious, ridiculous ladies
laughing in a circle around me,
arms skyward
bellies full.

I am camping in a house with a blow-up mattress, four boys and a sea of pale gray carpet.

I pretend that I will become a willowy, silver-haired chef in a teeny seafood cafe with open geranium windows.

I feel elastic,
spicy,
full of the buzz of the shift and the high of spontaneous, aromatic creation.

I touch the soft
inner bellies of scallops and the stringy stems of thyme
beaded with tiny, rough leaflets.

I worry about drug culture, pot heads and psychedelic mushrooms eroding personal drive.

I ask the world, if I wasn't scared what would I do Out West, in this new life.

I am camping in a house with a blow-up mattress, four boys and a sea of pale gray carpet.

I understand that the bright, blue of the sky, over the gold hills is an illusion of light scattering selectively.

I believe that avocados are verdant medicine and fall from their trees on cords like gifts being lowered to us.

I dream of playing that fiddle that is in a box, on a truck, on the highway and
making it sing past the beginner tunes I learned in high school, 
revving on into huapango, zydeco and bluegrass.

I trust that all things are a lesson, that nothing is without use and that God is filled with compassion.

I hope for rain this winter
green hills and a season of growth.
I am camping in a house with a blow-up mattress, four boys and a sea of pale gray carpet.

Poetry Friday: A New Year Comes

Happy Poetry Friday! Boy, has it ever been a while since I've participated. There's no time in the universe like the start of a new year to turn our hearts back to poetry. Whatever else this year may have for us, let us all be able to say that it holds more poems. Read other people's poetry, sing your poetry, rap your inner poem, or write it out with ink but get that stuff out and into the universe.

I can't wait to share with you my goals, lists, inspirations and reading plans for the coming 12 months. I like almost nothing in life more than I like a brand new year. Lets read about how it feels, shall we:


The First Month

Just the barest tip of a velvet beginning:
A year that is pink and wobbly legged,
Newly opened and untouched with tears
Under its wings lie messages, wishes, prayers
All of them creased into its first tender embrace.
Remember how to greet it properly?
You must let it kiss you on the mouth.

Join other Poetry Friday participants as we make a giant list of poems: old and new from many bloggers this month over at The Miss Rhumphius Effect.

A mug of hot tea and a candle and the Poetry Friday list is my favorite way to spend a lazy Saturday morning. I wish you a year filled with umpteen lazy Saturdays and so many good things!

Poetry Friday: One For Therapy

Dear World,

Its Poetry Friday. The weekend can begin now. A little balm for the soul, a little meaning for the road, a little dose of wisdom coated with deep noticing for what ails you. Lets have a poem.

A Poem For Hard Times

Poems are where your sobs come out in
Pointy, adverb strings, all the clauses sticking
Together like mucus or stress or a migraine the size of Canada.
We can click or scribble the physicality of
Our upset, the ocean liner size of it all
Honking out our lumbering pain, rhythmic (or not)
We can write stories we never owned that tell the
Fizzing, splattering, drippingintheicecolddark feelings that we live.
Poems can be canvasses for smearing our bright
Progress...the passage from a thick, globby raw umber
To a smeared gloss of cerulean blue in the far corner.
We can have poems that are for chewing on,
Instead of gnawing holes in our childhood loveys
Between our bone grinding sobs.
Poems can be there. They can hack it.
Poems don't blush or tell, or give a damn.
A light drift of verse can also be a rope out of the pit.
When you have cried yourself to sleep and wake up
Hollow, rasping in your shell
A poem can wink at you and kiss your hand
Pulling you upright, into the world and yourself.
And then it will lie there, after you have dressed,
Gleaming on your pillow while you make it into your bed
Waiting for you between your sheets and the quilt.
.

You can find other contributors at Live Your Poem, where Irene Latham is hosting this week's jamboree. Have a mug of tea, sit in silence and contemplate your own breath, read a  poem for each down beat of you heart and then have Saturday. Happy Weekend, Friends. May there always be poems in our brains....

Poetry Friday: Turtle Medicine

Happy Poetry Friday! We made it through the one last full week of winter. That is worth celebrating! Lets have a poem for dessert since we made it, shall we?

On vacation I bought myself a small carved turtle figure, a personal reminder of the life choices I was making and the lessons I keep being reminded of right now.

In Native American teaching, animals can be instructors and messengers sent to teach us things for a while or coming alongside us as tangible reminders of our identity and role in life. I have been learning turtle lessons for a while now and feel like God sends me turtle encounters as gentle nudges of His Presence and my own strengths and callings.

So today, a little turtle poetry...

Turtle Medicine
I am a turtle woman.
Placid rover, called to grounding
Needing slower paced out stalking
Hearer of the ancient wisdom
Trees and rocks and river talking
Drawn by God through paths of effort
Dredging through the channel blocking
Peace within, a well of comfort
Holy salve where fear is knocking
Long-lived being made for always
Eternal creature never stopping
Bearer of the world around me
Pillar-legged never balking
Wearer of my home and haven
Belonging present at each docking
Tortoise, Hawksbill, Slider, Terrapin
Loggerhead, Box and Painted teachers.
God's cold-blooded, scaly speakers
I am turtle woman listening.

You can click through and read more of my poems where I am slowly collecting them, on my Original Verse page. 

Tune in for the rest of this week's participants and see what other poems are out, waiting to speak to you. Our esteemed host for the collection this time around is Kara Newhouse, over at her blog Rogue Anthropologist. I always think a nice dose of poetry browsing is a fantastic way to celebrate a slower weekend morning. May you enjoy the same....

Poetry Friday: Re-creating My Grandparents

Happy Poetry Friday, everyone!

Today's poem is all about my maternal grandparents: Grandpa Mac and Grandma Sallie. I am one of those past-pickers who loves to marinate in the stories, details and even dates of my ancestors. I have drawn up family trees and dug around in the great, stale stores of The Internet for immigration records and am always pressing relatives for little stories and anecdotes. I think one of the key reasons why I am so fixated is because I long for a sense of connection of human understanding, of familial community that stretches deeper and farther than my varied cousins and my several aunts. I want to know what "we" as a clan were like in the Great Depression, how we cook, how we were in The Old Country, how we hold our liquor, how we walk, how we all tell jokes and what kinds of things we do in times of stress. I wish I could interview all my ancestors but instead I am writing a poem for them and for myself. 

My grandpa, the year the stock market crashed, 1929.

My grandma as a young woman with her first child, my aunt Nancy.

My Roots Are Showing

Odd how I run my fingers over and over
The many strands of my family roots,
Harping, my husband calls it when I go on.
I especially think about my grandparents:
I know I am lucky to have hugged them,
Had their wrinkled hands stroke mine
And to have felt their hair with sleepy fingers
But I know my versions of them are pale
Flickering, silhouettes sketches of people.
I remember old snatches of my grandpa:
Rag wool sweaters, pipe tobacco and his back
Bent in the sun over the stone garden wall.
Grandma is the scent of geraniums, solitaire
And glasses of water with crossword puzzles, 
A chic tip to her head, her feet curved and shuffling
I have these little torn, scavenged memories
And I have fashioned them into frozen collages
The two of them, stiff and quirky: static human art.
I know they gasped along like I do, their lives
As thumping and real as mine and my husband's
But sometimes I have to write to really feel them,
Cracking open the trunk of words in my mind
To enliven them, breathing in their realities
How it truly felt...in the bones, to have:
A cascade of preemie daughters, a house-fire,
A war hero ghost for a brother, an ex-wife,
An explosive temper, a yen for pink pistachios,
A college crush, a wry joke over gin,  a first art sale,
A master's degree, a quiet breakfast in Paris,
A job in another state, an absent spouse, a broken nose,
An alcoholic father, a museum you helped found,
A fear of gaining weight, A obsession with saving bags,
Or a commitment that sticks there through it all
Stubborn and eternal and lumpy like all real things.

My grandparents are the elegant couple on the left, my aunt and uncle on the right.

 You can go browse the other submissions for Poetry Friday tonight as a celebration of the weekend or tomorrow morning (like I will) with a mug of tea in hand. There is always a huge buffet of delicious offerings to pick through. Trudy is hosting this week over at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Happy Weekend!
xoxo

Poetry Friday: A Nursing Poem

Happy Poetry Friday, friends....I am so pleased to be celebrating again!

Today I am sharing a new poem about the end of nursing my baby. I am slowly weaning him and the whole family seems to be moving on towards more "big kid" focused stuff. Less teething rings and mobiles and whole heck of a lot more Lego.

One of the pieces of motherhood that I really want to make fresh for myself is living a regret-free existence fully in the current stage my kids are experiencing. I love babies. But I hope I never let that inclination cloud my vision about 7 year olds or 15 year old boys or 35 year old sons. All stages are lovely. All stages matter. All stages should be desired and remembered and looked forward to hopefully.

A stage is ending at my house. This may be the last baby I nurse, we are thinking about being done with the baby stage. Its a momentous decision and it feels exciting and liberating as well as heavy and unnerving. I feel a lot of cultural pressure to "never want my babies to grow up" but truthfully, I think that's toxic. So here is my alternative take.....

 Nursing My Last
I have made boys out of milk.
I have watched their thighs bulge,
And their hair emerge like cornsilk,
Small ideas quickening in their eyes
As warm white liquid poured into
Their verdant bodies.
I have had a prism of maternal life.
There were stained glass mornings
With snuggly Madonna feedings
And nights of caught-breath rage
After a jagged bite in the felted dark,
Cradling my chest and roaring at
The swaddled baby.
This life-giving beginning stage is
An amazing, vulnerable, terrifying
Kind of magic.
All full of Now.
Beyond supply, infections, latch,
Weaning, herbal teas, night feedings,
Cabbage leaves, mastitis, pumping,
Le Leche League, Dr. Sears,
Sheila Kitzinger, blebs, letdown,
colostrum, milk comas,  hindmilk
and learning to nurse lying down...
There has been the lesson of 
Now.
Pausing wherever it was needed.
Nursing in strange and sacred places.
Quitting urgent or exciting things.
I have learnt it four times now.
In the clasp of infant teachers.
Stop. 
Be.

Poetry Friday: Nest Song

Happy Poetry Friday! Its nesting season and all around the house we are watching pairs of birds defending territory, mate and build homes. In honor of all the bustle I am using one of my natural treasures as a writing prompt. I found this sweet little nest wedged into a dooryard shrub after all the leaves had come down in winter in the center of a secret maze of branches.

Ornithology
A bird is a dandy, a primping sheik,
A textile wizard, with a needled beak.
A nest is a circular, spiral of life,
An egg cup holding potential flight.
A chick is a greedy, squeaking wheel,
A pin-feather craft with a wobbling keel.
A flock is whirling, southward gust,
A chattering ballet in the autumn dusk.
A birder is a lonely and  desperate scout
A sentry of skies and feeder lookout.
A old nest in winter is his private proof,
An avian placard on the cupola roof.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend! We are celebrating Ru's 7th birthday and there may be some bird watching, some nest hunting and eating of malted milk ball eggs.

Poetry Friday: Marriage Advice for Myself

Happy Poetry Friday everyone!

I am writing today about a personal journey I'm having at the moment. I chose a theme word for this year to help me focus my thoughts and ideas and efforts. This is the year of "Acceptance" for me. I'm working more to accept the circumstances I am handed, to accept the problems that I am facing, to accept the people who have been put in my life, to accept myself and my flaws, to accept the good I'm given and the help and creativity and hope around me.

One of the biggest areas I'm really flexing the acceptance muscle is in my marriage. Its so easy to decide that the person we are with needs to change all of their problems, to distance ourselves from them and find ways to differentiate instead of unify, and even to wish away for refuse to acknowledge some of the truth of the current state. I'm on a quest to go to a different place: a knowing and a seeing that is not resignation but just awareness and honesty with overtones of oneness and deep compassion for him and for myself.

And then I made a poem.


If I Were Wise

If I were a wise woman
I would allow my husband to just be.
I'd let him care obsessively about
The exact time he goes to bed and the
The turning off of lights in empty rooms.
I would let him rage about slow traffic
And children who forget to put their shoes on.
I would listen to his worries about the
Dangers of caffeine and alcohol and liberals
And understand it all as his honest now.
I would live like a great warm radiator at his side,
Walking my own path and letting go of his.
I would see myself winking from his mirrored-skin
And hear his voice ripple in my exultant shout
Below the great cement arches of an over-pass. 

Go to Violet's blog this week to see all the other contributors to Poetry Friday today and read a cozy bunch of verse.

Poetry Friday: An Orphan Flower Story

Happy Poetry Friday! Welcome to the first Poetry Friday of the year. Always good to start a new year off with a little poetic reflection.

Silly, little poem from me today about how a cyclamen came to our house this week.

Cyclamen

My debit card left me secretely.
My yoga studio was blank and dark,
Class cancelled on this icy night.
I tried the next door grocery
Thinking stoically of my
Depleted supply of detergent.
The last cyclamen waved at me
Fluttering there on the display
Curving edges of lipstick petals
And shy, sage-veined leaves.
I tucked her snugly into my coat,
Along with one ripe papaya to
Encourage me in the winter cold.
But at the check-out I found the thing
My debit card had done, a sly jilting.
I thumbed and thumbed through my wallet,
Fumbling while the cyclamen nervously
Fluttered there on the cashier's belt.
Maybe the store manager could see
Botanical fear or loved a rescue.
He put his hand on my flickering ones
And told the cashier to type: store credit
As long as I return by Friday to pay.
And I hugged the damsel in pink to me
Glad that despite betrayal of my plastic card
I had found this fuchsia coquette for comfort.


You can find the other Poetry Friday contributions for today at our host, Matt's blog, Radio, Rythm and Rhyme. Have fun browsing! There are lots of cool posts on the list today!