How the Stars Came Down

 

Night. How the stars came down
arching over us, and the only name
we had for them was shooting stars.
Why there were so many was anybody's guess.
My great grandmother thought the world
was coming to an end when Haley's comet
flared across the sky. I lay flat on my back
and watched the night sky falling
all around me and I wanted,
more than anything, never to go home.
I did, of course. They put us campers into busses
and drove us back to tenements,
asphalt and streetlights in the city.
What I didn't know that night
in my bedroll at Sherwood Forest Camp
was that when I got home,
home wasn't my real home anymore.
I had a new home in my remembering
and it was dark and safe and beautiful
with shooting stars still falling all around.

Pat Schneider, Another River: New and Selected Poems (Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 2008)

Things My Mother Said

When I was a child
she said I’ve got eyes in the back of my head
she said I just don’t understand you
you should be ashamed of yourself
she said Look what you’ve made me do now
When I asked how old she was she said
As old as my gums and a little bit older than my teeth
She said Don’t let anyone see you down there
Men! she said Men!

When I was a teenager she looked me up and down
and said That dress does nothing for you
But sometimes she said Go and enjoy yourself love
and when I came back she said Who did you meet?
Whoever it was she knew their family history
She often asked me What’s the skeet?
but I had none and if I had
I wouldn’t have told it to her.

She always had her sights on the weather
You’re not going out without a coat in this
It’s fit to blow your head off
Sometimes she’d look me in the eye and say
Bless you love. Bless you, meaning thank you,
meaning I love you.

When her hearing went she said
Speak up you’re mumbling
she said It’s no joke getting old
and I’ll never make old bones
In her last year she said
86! Would you believe it?

skeet – a Manx word meaning gossip

 

Chrissy Banks, andotherpoems.com accessed on July 27, 2023

Found

My wife waits for a caterpillar
to crawl onto her palm so she
can carry it out of the street
and into the green subdivision
of a tree.

Yesterday she coaxed a spider
into a juicier corner. The day
before she hazed a snail
in a half-circle so he wouldn’t
have to crawl all the way
around the world and be 2000
years late for dinner.

I want her to hurry up and pay
attention to me or go where I
want to go until I remember
the night she found me wet
and limping, felt for a collar
and tags, then put me in
the truck where it was warm.

Without her, I wouldn’t
be standing here in these
snazzy, alligator shoes.

 

Ron Koertge, Fever (Red Hen Press, 2006)

Turkey Love

At the corner of our fenced yard
a tom fans his feathers, drops
first one barred wing, then the other,
sashays before our shed, a blue-faced
matador, red wattles swinging
as he taunts imagined rivals.
It is pure theater, and we, his only audience,
enchanted by the mysteries of wild courtship.
Two hens, bored or unimpressed,
peck under the bird feeder
before sauntering away.
Engrossed in his performance, the tom
fails to notice their exit at first, then panics,
dashing back and forth along the pickets
unable to find the open gate—
deflated and frantic, a comic Casanova.
Sympathetic to his plight, knowing well
how miscommunication leads to heartache,
I stand on our deck, cheering encouragements
while you go to his aid waving arms
to herd him out, because even turkey love
deserves a second chance.

 

Kathe Palka, Miracle of the Wine (Grayson Books, 2012)

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed-or were killed-on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

 

William Stafford, The Way It Is (Graywolf Press, 1999)

Religion

The last thing the old dog brought home
from her pilgrimages through the woods
was a man's dress shoe, a black, still-shiny wing-tip.

I feared at first a foot might be in it.
But no, it was just an ordinary shoe.
And while it was clear it had been worn,

and because the mouth of the dog —
a retriever, skilled at returning ducks and geese —
was soft, the shoe remained a good shoe

and I might have given it
to a one-legged friend
but all of them dressed their prostheses too,

so there it was. A rescued
or a stolen odd shoe. Though in the last months
of the dog's life, I noticed

how the shoe became her friend, almost,
something she slept on or near
and nosed whenever she passed,

as though checking it to see if,
in her absence, that mysterious, familiar,
missing foot, might not have come again.

 

Robert Wrigley, Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin Press, 2006)

Lead

Here is a story

to break your heart.

Are you willing?

This winter

the loons came to our harbor

and died, one by one,

of nothing we could see.

A friend told me

of one on the shore

that lifted its head and opened

the elegant beak and cried out

in the long, sweet savoring of its life

which, if you have heard it,

you know is a sacred thing,

and for which, if you have not heard it,

you had better hurry to where

they still sing.

And, believe me, tell no one

just where that is.

The next morning

this loon, speckled

and iridescent and with a plan

to fly home

to some hidden lake,

was dead on the shore.

I tell you this

to break your heart,

by which I mean only

that it break open and never close again

to the rest of the world.

 

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. II

Dust If You Must

Dust if you must, but wouldn't it be better
To paint a picture, or write a letter,
Bake a cake, or plant a seed;
Ponder the difference between want and need?

Dust if you must, but there's not much time,
With rivers to swim, and mountains to climb;
Music to hear, and books to read;
Friends to cherish, and life to lead.

Dust if you must, but the world's out there
With the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair;
A flutter of snow, a shower of rain,
This day will not come around again.

Dust if you must, but bear in mind,
Old age will come and it's not kind.
And when you go (and go you must)
You, yourself, will make more dust.

 

Rose Milligan, otherpeoplespoemstoo.blogspot.com 

Sabbath

 

          Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. 
          For in six days the Holy One made heaven and earth,
          but rested the seventh day.
                              —Exodus 20.8, 11

               Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy.
               Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,
               and the Holy One your God brought you out.
                              —Deuteronomy 5.12, 15


Not a day of piety and churchy things.
A day of emptiness.
God is doing the work. You are not.
You think you are more indispensable than God?
Let it go.
You have been freed from slavery,
so don’t act like a slave.
Honor your liberation, and take a day off.
Sabbath is an act of rebellion
against the pharaoh of forced labor that is in our heads.
It’s a strike. Join the strike, for the sake of all those who labor.

We empty ourselves, and wait.
Letting God and nothing else fill our time.
Letting time be a gift. Not an oppression.
Being unimportant, unproductive, irrelevant.
Being an empty canvas for God,
the warm silence of a recording studio for God.
Time to sit and receive, and to wait.
Time to behold the holiness
of the Silence at the heart of all things.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net October 1, 2020

Relatives

I just returned from a nephew's wedding
to a woman from Nepal. Amazing.
I now have dozens of new relatives
all over the world. A miracle.
How did I acquire this new family?
By two people's love for each other.

Your love has power beyond your knowing.
Your faithfulness creates a real thing,
a living organism greater than you can see.
The flowing of your love
enables the flowing of much more love.

You are given; you are received.
You belong. You are related.

Imagine a world
in which we regarded one another, even strangers,
with the love of kin.
As our nine year old grandson said,
“I kind of think we're all related—
you know, from Adam and Eve...”

Let your love and faithfulness
weave a miracle,
making strangers into family,
extending to the ends of the earth.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net July 6, 2023

Miracle

". . . and four of them were bringing to Jesus
a man who was paralyzed. . . . And when they
had made a hole in the roof, they lowered the
mat on which the paralyzed man was lying."
                                                        Mark 2:4

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in --

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

Until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tile roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain: Poems (Faber and Faber, 2011)

Sleep Apnea

Night after night, when I was a child,
I woke to the guttering candle
of my father’s breath. It made a sound
like the starlings that sometimes
got caught in our chimney, a chirping
that would gradually, steadily build
to a desperate, flat slapping of wings,
then suddenly drop into silence,
into the thick soot at the bottom
of midnight. No silence was ever
so deep. And then, after maybe
a minute or two, I would hear
a twitter as he came to life again,
and could at last take a breath for myself,
a sip like a toast, lifting a chilled glass
of air, wishing us courage, those of us
lying awake through those hours,
my mother, my sister and I, who each night
listened to death kiss the fluttering lips
of my father, who slept through it all.

 

Ted Kooser, otherpeoplespoemstoo.blogspot.com November 25, 2016 

Chivalry

He strolls down the middle of the sidewalk
leaving little room for me. I lag behind
to get around an open gate, to avoid
a fence post, a mailbox sticking out.
You don’t walk as fast as you used to, he says,
striding ahead on his personal red carpet,
feet turned slightly out, a spring in his step
like he’s about to go up for a jump shot.
I dodge a low branch and the open door
of a parked car. Just as I decide
to hip-check him out into the street
he stops and crouches to pet
a little white cat. He croons to her,
stroking her arched back. The cat
closes her eyes and I think of how he sleeps
nestled against me, turning when I turn
all night long, and never wakes me.

 

Debra Spencer, Pomegranate (Hummingbird Press, 2004)

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open
to the place inside which is unbreakable
and whole
while learning to sing.

 

Rashani Rea, janicefalls.wordpress.com April 22, 2020

From Which It All Began

Tell me, what
would you do today
if you knew your life
to be a celebration
of this world?

Would you stop
to gather sunlight
dropping soundlessly
upon pines
beyond your window pane?

Would you court
dreams too wide
for the container
of consciousness?

Would you linger
in the terrible beauty
of uncertainty
as if the fullness of the world
depended upon your presence?

Would you cast your hopes
upon possibilities that abide
only in departure?

Would you become the motion
of your song,
losing itself in overtones
of delight
or despair
and returning, finally,
to the stillness
from which it all began?

 

Bernadette Miller, janicefalls.wordpress.com July 16, 2019

Prayer for Our Country

God bless our country
with humility and wisdom,
to hear your voice
not in triumph over others
but in love for one another,
for all who, for every reason,
find themselves upon this land.
May our patriotism be care for all,
not just for one family or place or kind.
Give us courage to face injustice,
to resist the powers that diminish life,
to repent of hate, and heal oppression,
for the sake of liberty and justice for all.
Bless us with prosperity of gratitude,
freedom of love and abundance of generosity.
For the land and water that so richly provide for us
we give thanks and pray for healing and renewal.
Bless us all that we may truly belong to the land,
to one another, and to you,
in a spirit of unity, gratitude, and joy.
Amen.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net July 4, 2023