Small Deeps

We are too complicated.
We seek God here, there and everywhere.
We seek God in holy places, in books,
in rules, regulations, rites and rituals.
We seek God in pomp and glory and ceremony,
in relics and statues
and visions and shrines.
We seek God in Popes and Fathers and saints.
Ah, like lost bewildered children,
we seek outside the God
who waits to be found
in the small deeps
of the human heart.

Edwina Gateley, There Was No Path So I Trod One (Source Books, 1996)

Small Kindnesses

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say "bless you"
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. "Don't die," we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don't want to hurt each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, "Here,
have my seat." "Go ahead - you first," "I like your hat."

Danusha Lameris, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection (Green Writers Press, 2019)

Notes from the Delivery Room

Strapped down,
victim in an old comic book,
I have been here before,
this place where pain winces
off the walls
like too bright light.
Bear down a doctor says,
foreman to sweating laborer,
but this work, this forcing
of one life from another
is something that I signed for
at a moment when I would have signed anything.
Babies should grow in fields;
common as beets or turnips
they should be picked and held
root-end up, soil spilling
from between their toes --
and how much easier it would be later,
returning them to earth.
Bear up. . . Bear down. . . the audience
grows restive, and I'm a new magician
who can't produce the rabbit
from my swollen hat.
She's crowning, someone says,
but there is no one royal here,
just me, quite barefoot,
greeting my barefoot child.

Linda Pastan, Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1971)

Quilts

(for Sally Sellers)

Like a fading piece of cloth
I am a failure

No longer do I cover tables filled with food and laughter
My seams are frayed my hems falling my strength no longer able
To hold the hot and cold

I wish for those first days
When just woven I could keep water
From seeping through
Repelled stains with the tightness of my weave
Dazzled the light with my
Reflection

I grow old though pleased with my memories
The tasks I can no longer complete
Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past

I offer no apology only
this plea:

When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end
Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt
That might keep some child warm

And some old person with no one else to talk to
Will hear my whispers
And cuddle
near

Nikki Giovanni, from the Visual Verse Project

Second-Hand Coat

I feel
in her pockets; she wore nice cotton gloves,
kept a handkerchief box, washed her undies,
ate at the Holiday Inn, had a basement freezer,
belonged to a bridge club.
I think when I wake in the morning
that I have turned into her.
She hangs in the hall downstairs,
a shadow with pulled threads.
I slip her over my arms, skin of a matron.
Where are you? I say to myself, to the orphaned body,
and her coat says,
Get your purse, have you got your keys?

Ruth Stone, Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected (David R. Godine Pub., 1967)

Ice Cream Truck

From blocks away we heard the mechanical
music the ice cream truck chimed all over
the neighborhood, calling to kids like the Pied

Piper as we darted into our houses begging
our parents for change to buy Nutty Buddies

and banana popsicles, orange pushups
and ice cream sandwiches. Once the truck

stopped on our street, we swooped like seagulls
around the open window so the ice cream man
could take our money and hand out whatever

treats we asked for, which were always better
than we remembered from the last time his boxy,

hand-painted truck rolled around --the cold,
creamy confections freezing our tongues and

sliding down our parched throats as fast as we
could eat them -- the taste of summer lingering
just long enough to make us wish for more.

Terri Kirby Erickson, A Lake of Light and Clouds (Press 53, 2014)

You Were Asleep

when I came to bed all
curled up like a child

under the blanket and
when I slipped in be-

side you as quietly as
I could you stirred but

didn't really wake and
stretched out a hand to

cup my face as if you were
holding a bowl or a ball.

James Laughlin, The Collected Poems of James Laughlin (New Directions, 2014)

You Could Never Take a Car to Greenland

my daughter says. Unless the car could float.
Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean
turned to ice and promised not to crack.
Unless Greenland floated over here,
having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row
our country there. Our whole continent
would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless
we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw
could we use for that? What kind of oars
could deliver one country to another?
She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland
if it's not green? Why is Iceland called
Iceland if it's greener than Greenland?
Unless it's a trick, a lie: the name
Greenland is an ad for Greenland. Who would go
promised nothing but ice? Who would cut
her home to pieces and row away for that?

Maggie Smith, Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017)

Differences of Opinion

He Tells Her

He tells her that the earth is flat --

He knows the facts, and that is that.

In altercations fierce and long

She tries her best to prove him wrong.

But he has learned to argue well.

He calls her arguments unsound

And often asks her not to yell.

She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

Wendy Cope, originally appeared in Poetry, February, 2006, copyright by Wendy Cope, 2006

Oxygen

Everything needs it: bones, muscles, and even,
while it calls the earth its home, the soul.
So the merciful, noisy machine

stands in our house working away in its
lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel
before the fire, stirring with a

stick of iron, letting the logs
lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room,
are in your usual position, leaning on your

right shoulder which aches
all day. You are breathing
patiently; it is a

beautiful sound. It is
your life, which is so close
to my own that I would not know

where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do
with love, except

everything? Now the fire rises
and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red
roses of flame. Then it settles

to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds
as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift:
our purist, sweet necessity: the air.

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (Beacon Press, 2005)

Longing

Consider the blackpoll warbler.

She tips the scales
at one ounce
before she migrates, taking off
from the seacoast to our east
flying higher and higher

ascending two or three miles
during her eighty hours of flight
until she lands,
in Tobago,
north of Venezuela
three days older,
and weighing half as much.

She flies over open ocean almost the whole way.

She is not so different from us.
The arc of our lives is a mystery too.
We do not understand,
we cannot see
what guides us on our way:
that longing that pulls us toward light.

Not knowing, we fly onward
hearing the dull roar of the waves below.

Julie Cadwallader Staub, Wing Over Wing (Paraclete Press, 2019)

Country Music Every Time

In every song there's a little story
of a love and the myriad ways
it can go wrong. It can go wrong
as she stands in the kitchen
frying eggs. It can go wrong
as he's driving truck
through slick, black nights
down highways too long
to dream about. It can go wrong
for a strikebreaker or a stargazer.
It can break up with a word, a blow,
a night spent alone, over a TV show,
a menu, a baby who comes
or one who was only dreamed about.
Love, the country singer insists,
is the only thing worth anything.
The heart like a rock in the sand.
The waves in human song
break over it, over it.

Margaret Hasse, Stars Above, Stars Below (Nodin Press, 2018)

Knoxville, Tennessee

I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy's garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk
and homemade ice cream
at the church picnic
and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep

Nikki Giovanni, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment (HarperCollins Publisher, 1968)

The Gift to Sing

Sometimes the mist overhangs my path,
And blackening clouds about me cling,
But, oh, I have a magic way
To turn the gloom to cheerful day --
             I softly sing.

And if the way grows darker still,
Shadowed by Sorrow's somber wing,
With glad defiance in my throat,
I pierce the darkness with a note,
             And I sing, and sing.

I brood not over the broken past,
Nor dread whatever time may bring:
No nights are dark, no days are long,
While in my heart there swells a song,
              And I can sing.

James Weldon Johnson

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly --
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-clothes on my forehead,
and then led me out into the air light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bone and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift - not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-toned lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry:And Other Poems (Random House, 2005)

Accidents

There is no infant
this time,
only my own life swaddled
in bandages
and handed back to me
to hold in my two arms
like any new thing,
to hold to my bruised breasts
and promise
to cherish.

The smell of cut
flowers encloses this room,
insistent as anesthetic.
It is spring.
Outside the hospital window
the first leaves have opened
their shiny blades,
and a dozen new accidents
turn over in their sleep,
waiting to happen.

Linda Pastan, Poetry, April, 1987

To a Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park.
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like
a handkerchief
waving goodbye.

Linda Pastan, Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988)