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 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!

Poetry Friday: Winter Cherry Cinquain

Happy Poetry Friday! I am sharing a cinqain today, a shorter form but kind of fun for its simplicity and compact succinctness. Yesterday the boys and  I pulled over because I spotted the first blooms of tiny, flowers on the dormant looking branches of a Prunus subhirtella, the winter cherry. It was bitter cold so the boys all stayed bundled in the car while I braved the frosty air, breathing smoky clouds of breath on the branches in the sunlight. I took one tiny blossom into the car and let my four year old hold the tiny bloom up to his eye, examining the minute gold stamens with a smile. This is all in December, in New England...in below freezing temperatures, mind you.

 Last year I noticed the little blossoms in February by chance and went dashing home all full of global warming sadness and googled to see if other people in my area were seeing cherry trees bloom far, far too early.  Instead I met this particular species of cherry and found out that it was happily doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing....blooming "sporadically from autumn until spring." There is a whole row of them there, standing side by side all along the parking lot. This year, knowing they are there now the boys and I will keep enjoying the gradual, gentle show. I do love an unexpected pleasure. 

Winter Sakura

I find
Pale, petals
Fluttering in the chill park
December-time cherry blossoms.
Rosy snow. 

 Alison is hosting Poetry Friday round-up today over on her blog Robin Hood Black. Take a lazy, meander through the offerings and enjoy a little poetry with your Saturday morning tea. I am hoping to get a chance myself, mug in hand, baby on my knee....

Poetry Friday: A Vacation Memoir

Happy Poetry Friday everyone!!!! Its been ages since I wrote a poem. My poety self disappeared for a bit there under knee x-rays and layers of homeschool curricula. Am back and am not to be beaten down. Feeling very inspired by all the determined women who made office during the recent election. If they can all manage to accomplish political careers and break glass ceilings then I will battle to squeak out a poem on Fridays. Huzzah!

This week I am thinking of our recent trip to Hawaii. We spent some time visiting A's brother Miq and his wife, the inimitable  Penny (visiting family is a good excuse for trips to exotic locales!) and then we also took half the vacation to island hop about on our own and explore. We came to Hawaii for our honeymoon ten years ago so we were returning after a decade to not only enjoy the tropical breeze but also to remember where we started and celebrate having made it this far, back in a kind of grand circle. It was kind of a family vacation/second honeymoon/relative visiting trip...just a little of everything in there.

It was fun to go back as a painter. I feel like it changes the way I see so much of life...I notice amazing colors, the way light glows along an edge, and the soft quality of the air in a vista. One of things that really has stayed in my mind was the fruit. Its a beautifully agricultural and lush place so there's no shortage of ripe, juicy, glistening fruits everywhere. The fruits we have here are equally lovely really, there's just something very fresh about things you don't have where you live. This is what I am remembering now as the weather crisps and blusters outside our house and December looms large.

A Ripe Visit 

Staying in their teak, jungle bungalow
Was beautiful, like the breakfast papaya:
Glistening crescents of spoon-soft gold;
Florals melting into the walls of your mouth. 
They smiled easily and shared their croquet set,
The balls rolling into a dip under the banana tree.
Life there was warm and soft, rippling onward.
We stripped magenta ramubutans slowly and read
Languid stories to the children about dragon gold.
I got up one morning with the roosters and
Watched dawn rise over corrugated metal to the
Nutty snap of a longan skin between my teeth.
We made outings like good vacationers do 
To Chinatown for highlighter pink dragonfruit
To a local farm stand for starfruit with a song
Like a raspberry catching the crest of a sunset.
And to the pineapple plantation where the fruit
Rises like trophies out of a vast plain of thorns.
We picked guavas in a baking crater and ate them
Dripping juice on the gearshift in the front seat.
We found one wild lilikoi, plump and dangling from
Vines tangled with lipstick, wild fuchsia blooms.
That night when we sawed it open at the table
And passed around sips of the jellied seeds
They told us about a friend's newborn daughter
Improbably named after the passionate little fruit.
On the last morning of our visit, hustling for the plane
We ate breakfast together standing in the kitchen
Scooping up avocado flesh with spoons
And then hurling dripping mango into our mouths.
Desperate to eat up paradise before our flight.
We drove out of their bouncing lane and
Saw them framed by an enormous santol tree
Wrapping his arms around them in the sun.

Our host today for Poetry Friday is Amy over at The Poem Farm. Please drop by and savor some of the other contributions if you find yourself sitting with a mug of tea on Saturday morning in a quiet hour. A little poetry does a body good.

Have a beautiful weekend!

Poetry Friday: A Hedge Poem

Happy Poetry Friday everyone! Today I'm writing about a task I'm mostly not really doing these days but more fantasizing about. Our hedge desperately needs a good buzz and I am normally the woman for the job but at the moment the thought of expending all that energy is ultra-daunting and so it stands there in rabid neglect getting hairier by the hour. At least I can write about how it feels to trim it all up nicely, right?

Sometime soon I will take a good hack at it. Although "soon" may not actually come until about July. Boo! I am seriously considering a landscaping company taking a one-off drive-by at my house just to whack it into shape once before spring ends and I go crazy looking at it.

Clipping The Hedge

The vibrant hedge needs haircuts
Just as well as my crop of sons.
It has to be kept within bounds,
Snipping off the clouds of wagging
Shoots that hang down over its face
It will lose itself altogether if allowed
Bulging inappropriately in
Front of the whole neighborhood.
I grind the big shears a pass or two
Warming up the jaws before bites.
With my head on the side I chop
First, the few, high snips to level out
The leafy green table-top above.
Then I advance with my weapon
A cheek pressed against the wall
My sword arm deftly slicing off
The extra limbs and stray parts
As the flanks appear again, decently
A rain of tender stems and leaf bits
Sifts foot-ward leaving a bright,
Lush runner down the driveway.
Sticky green juice edges the blade lips
As they snip hungrily along the wall.
Sometimes I reach a hand up
To feather the cut edges of the hedge
As though it were my husband's hair
Knocking loose the bits of snipped green
Tenderly, brushing it off a brow or a cheek.
As a final touch I must squint down
The line of the shorn wall, my nose nestled
In the bright smell of chloryphyll
Sighting out any stray, missed bit
And when I finally have it perfect
Inhale the bright scent and run an arm
Down the fluttering length of green on my
Way to the garage for my favorite rake.


 Our Poetry Friday host this week is TeacherDance. Click your way over and have another helping or two of poetry to send you off into the weekend.

Until Monday, Friends....until Monday....

Poetry Friday: A Botany Poem

I have been soaking in Amy Merrick's stunning blog An Apple A Day whenever I get a spare minute. Between that, spring being present and spring cleaning addling my brain a bit my thoughts have become quite blossom-soaked. Why fight it? Spring wants to be center-stage...so let her.

Flowers on Dancing Woman (Photo credit: TheArches)

My poem today is all about this very favorite season of mine...and maybe explains a bit of the madness we all feel suddenly at this time of year. May she ever shake her blossomy mane on my street....

Sunlit leaves in spring with and without backlight (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Once A Sensualist Dame...

Spring is doing her passionate tarentella
All down our block and the next one too
Pursing her bold red tulips and fiercely
Kicking up chartruese, grassy spears.
She shakes her tinkling forsythia mane
And drops rings of daffodil at every door.
She lays herself a rosy, blossom rug on
The corner under the lush magnolia tree.
Where she blows a flirty kiss of pear petal
Confetti after every oblivious, passing car.
She winks a forget-me-not eye in each yard,
Reaches her long, leaf-tipped limbs skyward
And performs a saucy, hosta-fringed hip-roll
That always leaves my old house open-doored
Lolling dusty rugs from every window.

Wall painting from Stabiae: Flora with the cornucopia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You can find the other Poetry Friday participants contributions over at Book Talk, today's host blog. Feel free to chip in with your own additions too! Participation is open to all....just link up and join the throng.

Poetry Friday: A Personal Collage

Happy Poetry Friday to you all! Today's poem is a little more free-style than my usual route. I'm feeling fast and loose and also looking to shake it up, it's good for the brain to try things that are different and unfamiliar. (On that note, if you're looking to grow your brain, lose and old habit or pick up a good one....check out this fascinating show from my local NPR station about that topic. Super interesting stuff!) Change is good.

I'm sort of letting my mind go a bit and stream-of-consciousness embroidering here with words about what composes my person. It's a little less concrete, sometimes a little obscure but kind of fun. Less story, more mental collage. Kind of like playing darts with my own brain.

Image via Wikipedia

I am the Following

I am a creator of beauty and a pursuer of growth.
I wonder why numbers slip through my memory like silt.
I hear the sticky murmur of yeast rising in bread dough.
I see the clicking shift from grey to pink light in summer.
I want a gold canary to keep me kitchen company.
I am a creator of beauty and a pursuer of growth.

I pretend that my motherhood shift will end at 5 PM.
I feel hungry every morning before I open my eyes.
I touch the faces pressed dully against city bus windows.
I worry about hypocrisy and the way it wrinkles souls.
I cry when my sons are raw in the crook of my neck.
I am a creator of beauty and a pursuer of growth.

I understand that God is love and all love is God.
I say "might as well leave well enough alone."
I dream about flying smoothly, my legs folded in lotus pose.
I try to get up early even if I feel like ignoring the world
I hope for a better garden every year, watered and lush.
I am a creator of beauty and a pursuer of growth.

Please stop by at A Gathering of Books for all the rounded up contributors to today's Poetry Friday. All kinds of good stuff to soak up if you're looking for inspiration.

Hope your weekend is sublime!