Resurrection Bodies

I laundered my iPhone the other day,

left in a pants pocket bound for washer glory.

After all the agitation and spin ceased,

below the damp graveclothes,

I found its corpse, cold and dead,

circuitry and battery drowned.

Ashes to ashes, suds to suds.

 

How our lives seem to rely on our phones.

How anxious we feel about sudden loss!

But fear not,

iCloud carried a backup.

 

After purchasing and registering a newer model,

restoring from the heavenly Cloud began.

Soon, all my old apps, photos, and music

miraculously appeared on my new phone.

My old phone’s configuration,

its personality, its spirit, its soul,

resurrected in the new model.

The same soul in an upgraded body,

newer, sleeker, faster, better,

more glorious.

A promise to us all.

 

Mark D. Stucky, Time of Singing 48:1 Spring 2021 

Housekeeping

We mourn the broken things, chair legs

wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,

the threadbare clothes. We work the magic

of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.

We save what we can, melt small pieces

of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones

for soup. Beating rugs against the house,

we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading

across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw

the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs

out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.

I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,

listen for passing cars. All day we watch

for the mail, some news from a distant place.

 

Natasha Trethewey, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000)

Recess, Second Grade

Past the blacktop, past the swings
a girl has wandered into tall grass,
dry and golden and high, and look
how she tucks in beneath the seed heads
and makes in the stems a nest,
lies on her back and looks up at the sky.
She can hear the screams and squeals
of other children as they play.
But here she is daughter of silence,
fallen angel of sunshine. There are wings
inside her breath. What does she know
that I have forgotten? What does she
love that I now squint to see?
Where does she still live in this woman,
this wanderling who was me?

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com

No Matter What They Say

You do not have to get over it.
You will carry your grief
and be carried by loss
in any way the carrying happens.
As if you had a choice.
Grief builds rooms inside you
no one else will ever see,
rooms with doors
only you can pass through
filled with songs or silence
only you can hear.
Rest here. Or dance here.
Shout. Or whisper. Rise
like milkweed seeds on the wind.
Or lie. Here, you can only do it right.
Here, there are no other eyes
or ears to tell you what to do
or how long it will take
or what choices to make.
And if you are weeping, weep.
And if you are dry, you are dry.
The rest of the world
can talk about stages
of grief and how it should be,
but you, you do not have to listen.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com October 11, 2024

Just a Thing?

I’ve worn it since the day he died,
this ring that was my son’s.
A simple band—not flashy.
Plain silver inlaid with white.
I touch it when I think of him.
I think of him when I touch it.
My thumb has memorized
its smoothness, its edges.
I know it now as well
as once I knew his cheek.
I wear its secrets,
and do not ask it to tell.
One winter, I lost the ring.
It felt like losing him again.
I know. It’s just a thing.
But it’s not. It was his ring.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com October 14, 2024 

Lord, how much juice you can squeeze

Lord, how much juice you can squeeze from a single grape.

How much water you can draw from a single well.

How great a fire you can kindle from a tiny spark.

How great a tree you can grow from a tiny seed.

My soul is so dry that by itself it cannot pray;

Yet you can squeeze from it the juice of a thousand prayers.

My soul is so parched that by itself it cannot love;

Yet you can draw from it boundless love for you and for my neighbor.

My soul is so cold that by itself it has no joy;

Yet you can light the fire of heavenly joy within me.

My soul is so feeble that by itself it has no faith;

Yet by your power my faith grows to a great height.

Thank you for prayer, for love, for joy, for faith;

Let me always be prayerful, loving, joyful, faithful.

 

Guigo the Carthusian, susansbooksandgifts.com November 25, 2020

Be Careful

and watch your back, my mother used to say

each time I stepped out the door, left her

for the airport and the long trip back home.

Now, I look over my shoulder, expecting

to find her there, leaning on her purple cane,

oxygen tube trailing as she inches forward.

Out of the 60,000 thoughts I will have today,

let this one live at the forefront of my mind:

Her love will never die. And out of the 600,000

words in English, let mother be the one that

I carry with me through the difficult hours,

like a stone to rub over and over, looking up 

into my rear-view mirror to see who or what

might be following me.

 

James Crews, The Weekly Pause October 4, 2024 

The Game

And on certain nights,
maybe once or twice a year,
I’d carry the baby down
and all the kids would come
all nine of us together,
and we’d build a town in the basement

from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.
And some lived under the pool table
or in the bathroom or the boiler room
or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,
and you could be a man or a woman
a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around
like a day in the village until

one of us turned off the lights, switch
by switch, and slowly it became night
and the people slept.

Our parents were upstairs with company or
not fighting, and one of us—it was usually
a boy—became the Town Crier,
and he walked around our little sleeping
population and tolled the hours with his voice,
and this was the game.

Nine o’clock and all is well, he’d say,
Walking like a constable we must have seen
in a movie. And what we called an hour passed.
Ten o’clock and all is well.
And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep
or a grown up baby cried and was comforted…
Eleven o’clock and all is well.
Twelve o’clock. One o’clock. Two o’clock…

and it went on like that through the night we made up
until we could pretend it was morning.

 

Marie Howe, What the Living Do (Norton, 1998)

Divorce

What God has joined together, let no one separate.
                         —Mark 10.9


Don't pick this up as a club to beat divorcees.
It's already caused enough harm.

Only men had the power to marry or divorce.
Jesus was protecting women from being used and discarded.

Jesus' accusers want to know what is lawful;
but he always seeks what is life-giving.

Sometimes when a couple has married
it's not God that has joined them.

What God has joined together is a whole person;
don't let a bad marriage break them.

Sometimes what keeps the “bent over woman” down
is a marriage from which Jesus would set her free.

Sometimes the paralyzed need to get up and walk away first;
only then can the healing begin.

Sometimes when Jesus says “Follow me”
there are things he wants one to leave behind.

Always and ever Jesus invites us
not toward what is lawful but what is life-giving.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net October 3, 2024

Good and Bad

            “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,
            and not receive the bad?”
                         —Job 2.10


God is not a card dealer.
God is not a guy who distributes weal or woe
according to some inscrutable scheme.

God is the Love at the heart of all existence,
who is present with grace and blessing
in every moment, everything that happens.

God does not “send” us our experiences;
God experiences them with us, with love,
the “'good” and the “bad.”

Our judgments of “good” and “bad” experiences
are mostly a reflection of our pleasure or pain.
They all contain both difficulties and blessings.

Divine grace is present in all of them.
The Beloved imbues even our triumphs with challenges,
and even our disasters with possibility.

In both the good and the bad,
what we receive “at the hand of God”
is neither weal nor woe, but the hand of God.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net October 4, 2024

Free Breakfast

The Springhill Suites free breakfast area
was filling up fast when a man carrying his
disabled young son lowered him into his
chair, the same way an expert pilot’s airplane
kisses the runway when it lands. And all the
while, the man whispered into his boy’s ear,
perhaps telling him about the waffle maker
that was such a hit with the children gathered
around it, or sharing the family’s plans for the
day as they traveled to wherever they were
going. Whatever was said, the boy’s face was
alight with some anticipated happiness. And
the father, soon joined by the mother, seemed
intent on providing it. So beautiful they all
were, it was hard to concentrate on our eggs
and buttered toast, to look away when his
parents placed their hands on the little boy’s
shoulders and smiled at one another, as if
they were the luckiest people in the room.

 

Terri Kirby Erickson, A Sun Inside My Chest (Press 53, 2020)

Never Too Late

I was off last week at my brother's wedding.
The bride is a young one,
but at 69 the groom is a certified geezer.
Sixty-nine is a great age for marriage.
It's a time of looking toward the future with hope,
because every time is, even when it seems late.
Now is the time, and not too late, to declare your heart.
Now is the time to make a commitment.
Now, no matter how much time is left,
is a time, the very best time,
to cast your lot with love and beauty and faithfulness.
Some choices are too late, too far gone.
But most of your choices still lie ahead of you.
Every day you choose love over cynicism,
wonder over smugness, generosity over fear.
Every day you choose to give yourself to the world
and not hold back, not wait for something.
Do you love this world?
Today, this very day, late as it may be,
life asks you for your hand, and today—
yes, now and evermore, is a good time to say
“I do.”

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net September 2, 2024

Dreams

in my younger years

before i learned

black people aren’t

suppose to dream

i wanted to be

a raelet

and say “dr o wn d in my youn tears”

or “tal kin bout tal kin bout”

or marjorie hendricks and grind   

all up against the mic

and scream

“baaaaaby nightandday   

baaaaaby nightandday”

then as i grew and matured

i became more sensible   

and decided i would   

settle down

and just become

a sweet inspiration

 

Nikki Giovanni, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment (HarperCollins Publishers, 1968, 1970)

Graveyard Shift at Ace's Truck Stop

Speed popping, long haul truckers stretch, yak, and
drink coffee with locals searching for pancakes or bacon
and eggs after a night of drinking, dancing, gambling, and
making whoopee at nightspots like the Tower Ballroom,
Saddlehead Sam’s, the 69 Drive-In, Barto’s Idle Hour
and the VFW. The haggard and the high class together.
No place else open. Roy Orbison belts out Candy Man
from the neon and chrome Wurlitzer. Cigarette smoke
curls around the horseshoe bar beneath a large, stuffed
deer head. Three a.m., crowd gone, fry cook leans over a
newspaper. Waitress rolls a nickel from her tip pocket
into the juke, punches in her selection, slides wearily
into a booth, puts her feet up, and lights a Pall Mall. Elvis
begins to sing. She closes her eyes and mouths the words,
Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight?
Are you sorry we drifted apart?

 

J. T. Knoll, Others Like Us (36 West Press, 2016)

The Diagnosis

Well, he said, I’ve seen it before.

You have all the symptoms.

Fairly common, actually.

You have life. It’s terminal.

I will give you, oh, about

forty years to live. Some people

really pull through, make the most

out of what they have left.

 

As he walked away, I listened

to his footsteps until all I could hear

was the sound of my own breathing.

God, it was beautiful, a tide, a river.

And that plant in the corner, have you

ever seen anything so delicate, so green?

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingsveils.com January 5, 2019

To tell a girl you loved her

To tell a girl you loved her - my God! -

that was a leap off a cliff, requiring little

sense, sweet as it was. And I have loved

many girls, women too, who by various fancies

of my mind have seemed loveable. But only

with you have I actually tried it: the long labor,

the selfishness, the self-denial, the children

and grandchildren, the garden rows planted

and gathered, the births and deaths of many years.

We boys, when we were young and romantic

and ignorant, new to the mystery and the power,

would wonder late into the night on the cliff's edge:

Was this love real? Was it true? And how

would you know? Well, it was time would tell,

if you were patient and could spare the time,

a long time, a lot of trouble, a lot of joy.

This one begins to look -- would you say? -- real?

Wendell Berry, Leaving (Counter Point Press, 2010)

Leaves

And now these are the autumn years,
everything turning to gold. As the leaves
let go, so do old friends, the hardest to lose;
they take your history along with them.
These yellow leaves outside my window
flitter down, a flock of finches landing
on the lawn. Which frost will soon
coat with its hard white glitter.

 

Barbara Crooker, Canary Fall 2024

The Composer Says This Is How We Should Live Our Lives

He lifts his violin and gives us the fox
in Ireland running with wild abandon
along the cliff-edge above the wild Irish Sea

and I am back in Connemara where even
the pasture stones have names and the green
slopes are plentiful with stones and the sea-wind

where there are no trees to stop it rollicks
across the commonage and the sea's a wild rolling
and the composer's brown hair is whipping around

his young intense face as his arm jigs and swings
the bow across the strings and his body is swaying
and his shoulders are leaping and the music is leaping

and the fox is running with such joy along that cliff
red fox brilliant green pasture cerulean sky
and the wind and the white-capped

plum-blue ocean and a man's foot measuring time
in the sun that is beyond brilliant and the fox is leaping
forward along the cliff-edge.

 

Patricia Fargnoll, Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press, 2005)

Something

 

The minute the doctor says colon cancer

you hardly hear anything else.

He says other things, something

about something. Tests need to be done,

but with the symptoms and family something,

excess weight, something about smoking,

all of that together means something something

something something, his voice a dumb hum

like the sound of surf you know must be pounding,

but the glass window that has dropped down

between you allows only a muffled hiss

like something something. He writes a prescription

for something, which might be needed, he admits.

He hands you something, says something, says goodbye,

and you say something. In the car your wife says

something something and something about dinner,

about needing to eat, and the doctor wanting tests

doesn’t mean anything, nothing, and something

something something about not borrowing trouble

or something. You pull into a restaurant

where you do not eat but sit watching her

eat something, two plates of something,

blurry in an afternoon sun thick as ketchup,

as you drink a glass of something-cola

and try to recall what the doctor said

about something he said was important,

a grave matter of something or something else.

James Valvis, Poetry 180 No. 160, May 7, 2021

On Sticking Out Like a Sore Opposable Thumb

We give hummingbirds sugar water

in defiance of dentists’ recommendations

everywhere, and in return

for our sweetness, have been gifted a nest

of thistle and dandelion down

attached with spider silk

to a plant on the front porch

that holds a peeping chick

I’m afraid to look at

lest my giant face and eyes

scare the tiniest heart for miles.

 

You probably know by now

of the extinction of birds

and the growing similarity

of those that remain, who are becoming

more and more crow-

and sparrow-like, snowy egrets

soon gone, griffon vultures, says thems

that study such things. Forgive me

 

for making the plural pluraler,

I just want more of everything

in this time of lessening

and to keep us from erasing

the world’s green and red plumage,

its blue and wild defiance of gravity.

And forgive us, for we are big-brained

 

and small-wisdomed, mostly inadvertently deadly

and largely incapable

of understanding the complexity of life,

yet we have bulldozers, earth movers,

power plants, car and swizzle stick factories,

can dam or redirect rivers, cut off

the tops of mountains and drill miles

below the sea, can even make matter

explode, smash the stuff of all stuff

to bits, making us gods

in diapers, magicians who have no clue

what we’ve pulled out of the hat,

and we need help. In addition to their zip

 

and chittering, their air wars

at the feeder over the four fake flowers

to sip from, what I love about the hummingbirds

is also what I fear about nature,

the constant demonstration

of human inability

to find a modest niche

and nestle among the other breaths. Are we

 

an amazing blaze, an evolutionary

oops-a-daisy so devoted to the pursuit

of comfort and ease

that for the sake of hummingbirds

and stoats, bats and bears, waterfalls

and evergreens and everglades

we have to go, or can we change,

can we share, I ask you now,

since my Magic 8 Ball shrugged

at the question, and the river

mumbled something about being late,

and I’m lost somewhere between

the reasonableness of indoor plumbing

and air-conditioning and the insanity

of buying toilet paper on-line. Another way

 

to put this: how many lives

and species are single-serving puddings

worth? I know: yum. But is yum

enough?

 

Bob Hicok, rattle.com August 7, 2022

This poem is written in response to an article at newscientist.com/article/2329952

Early in the Morning

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

 

Li-Young Lee, readalittlepoetry.com September 4, 2005 

In Return

          What can you give in return for your life?

                         —Mark 8.37

In our money-made world
we understand transaction.
We're ready to make a deal.
What then do we do
with an incommensurate, unanswerable gift?
What can you give in return for your life?
Only your life,
full of what only you can put into it.

Yet think of what we exchange for life.
The way we trade in real life
for the feeling of being liked,
or right, or safe, or worthy.
It's a cheap imitation. Don't buy it.

Receive the gift,
cherish it—
and give it away.
It will be given again to you,
newer, brighter, a good measure,
pressed down, shaken together, running over,
over and over.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net. September 13, 2024

Anagrammer

If you believe in the magic of language, then Elvis really Lives and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin. If you believe the letters themselves contain a power within them, then you understand what makes outside tedious, how desperation becomes a rope ends it. The circular logic that allows senator to become treason, and treason to become atoners. That eleven plus two is twelve plus one, and an admirer is also married. That if you could just rearrange things the right way you’d find your true life, the right path, the answer to your questions: you’d understand how the Titanic turns into that ice tin, and debit card becomes bad credit. How listen is the same as silent, and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

 

Peter Pereira, Poetry Foundation Newsletter September 6, 2024

At the Toll Booth

They are serving Toll House cookies
at the toll booth on the Maine Turnpike.
Someone peeps out through pleated drapes
of a swollen ebony hearse
to see if there is some mistake.
But no, attendants are moving
deftly among clogged cars
balancing silver trays heaped high
with succulent cookies
still warm with chocolate oozing
over the fluted rims.
Small dogs gather to catch the excess
as cars continue to pile up
even in the exact change lane
yet no one seems to mind the delay,
The Toll House cookies are golden and good.
The withered face peering out
from the silent hearse
fills with delicate memories
of an uncomplicated childhood.

 

Marilyn Donnelly, Coda (Autumn House Press, 2010)

Spiritual

It all counts as practice—

the way you stack clean dishes 

in the drainer so they won’t break, 

how you wipe down the counter 

and fold the towels. How you talk 

to a co-worker, or your husband 

after a hard day, saying to him: 

You can lay your head in my lap, then 

spending the rest of the evening

rubbing his temples to release

the pain locked inside. And isn’t this

as sacred an act as bowing to a statue 

of the Buddha, or standing in line 

for hours just to touch the worn 

bronze toe of St. Peter in Rome, 

believing that single gesture might

bless the rest of your life?

 

James Crews, ‘The Weekly Pause’ August 2, 2024 

The World Loves You Back

Even if no one ever touched you

with the tenderness you needed,

believe that the world’s been

holding you in its arms since

the day you were born. You are

not an accident, or afterthought.

Let rain on the roof remind you.

Let sun on the skin, and the neon-

orange of the Mexican sunflower

at which a hummingbird pauses

to drink. There are so many ways

to hold and be held, and you

could spend your whole life

tallying them up, without ever

reaching the end of the list.

 

James Crews, Unlocking the Heart (Mandala Publishing, 2024)

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

 

Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (W. W. Norton & Co 2015)

Erasers

As punishment, my father said, the nuns
     would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day's erasers.

Punishment? The pounding symphony
     of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm's length overhead

(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
     powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)

was more than remedy, it was reward
     for all the hours they'd sat
without a word (except for passing notes)

and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
     black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk

baton, the only one who got to talk.
     Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,

poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
     My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black

chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
     those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices

gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
     can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn't spell

this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
     who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.

 

Mary Jo Salter, Open Shutter (2003)

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

 

The loud voice is famous to silence,  

which knew it would inherit the earth  

before anybody said so.  

 

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds  

watching him from the birdhouse.  

 

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.  

 

The idea you carry close to your bosom  

is famous to your bosom.  

 

The boot is famous to the earth,  

more famous than the dress shoe,  

which is famous only to floors.

 

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it  

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.  

 

I want to be famous to shuffling men  

who smile while crossing streets,  

sticky children in grocery lines,  

famous as the one who smiled back.

 

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,  

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,  

but because it never forgot what it could do.

 

Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words  (Far Corner Books, 1995)

Lord, how much juice you can squeeze

Lord, how much juice you can squeeze from a single grape.

How much water you can draw from a single well.

How great a fire you can kindle from a tiny spark.

How great a tree you can grow from a tiny seed.

My soul is so dry that by itself it cannot pray;

Yet you can squeeze from it the juice of a thousand prayers.

My soul is so parched that by itself it cannot love;

Yet you can draw from it boundless love for you and for my neighbor.

My soul is so cold that by itself it has no joy;

Yet you can light the fire of heavenly joy within me.

My soul is so feeble that by itself it has no faith;

Yet by your power my faith grows to a great height.

Thank you for prayer, for love, for joy, for faith;

Let me always be prayerful, loving, joyful, faithful.

 

Guigo the Carthusian, Facebook Group: Mystic Prayers March 20, 2021 

The First Book

Open it.

 

Go ahead, it won’t bite.

Well…maybe a little.

 

More a nip, like. A tingle.

It’s pleasurable, really.

 

You see, it keeps on opening.

You may fall in.

 

Sure, it’s hard to get started;

remember learning to use

 

knife and fork? Dig in:

you’ll never reach bottom.

 

It’s not like it’s the end of the world –

just the world as you think

 

you know it.

 

Rita Dove, 318class710.blogspot.com 

The Gift

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

my father recited a story in a low voice.

I watched his lovely face and not the blade.

Before the story ended, he’d removed

the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

 

I can’t remember the tale,

but hear his voice still, a well

of dark water, a prayer.

And I recall his hands,

two measures of tenderness

he laid against my face,

the flames of discipline

he raised above my head.

 

Had you entered that afternoon

you would have thought you saw a man

planting something in a boy’s palm,

a silver tear, a tiny flame.

Had you followed that boy

you would have arrived here,

where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

 

Look how I shave her thumbnail down

so carefully she feels no pain.

Watch as I lift the splinter out.

I was seven when my father

took my hand like this,

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin,

Ore Going Deep for My Heart.

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,

Death visited here!

I did what a child does

when he’s given something to keep.

I kissed my father.

 

Li-Young Lee, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986) 

Glory

A July afternoon 
A friend’s deck 
A Michigan lake

A bald eagle lodges itself onto a nearby tree 
Big brute shoulders and murderous intent 
Then off as he galumphs over the water

A Baltimore oriole comes to a feeder 
Bold beautiful black above a brilliant belly 
I thought I understood orange

The eagle is a torpedo bomber 
The oriole God’s paintbrush 
So much to be astonished by

I look for the edge 
What we’ve almost lost 
What we’re losing

Yet today is heaven 
Bright sun dancing on blue water 
I break off a bit of bread with my wine

 

Jeffery Munroe, Christian Century July 2024

Twenty Minutes in the Backyard

The house sparrow flies to the ground

To get the seed that has fallen from the feeder.

 

In doing so, it flies through a bit of spiderweb

Which works as something like a phone call

 

To the spider, who then answers with a hello,

Careful and very quiet, but nobody is there.

 

This happens a lot to spiders.

It makes them grumble about the neighbors

 

Who walk across the spider’s curious lawn.

But the complaint is hollow—sometimes

 

Someone is indeed there, a fly, a moth,

Any number and manner of very small beast.

 

They try to run away but are tripped up

By the long, thin fingers of the web.

 

The small thing quivers, asks politely, please,

To be let go, followed by a sincere apology.

 

But a spider does not have ears. This explains

Why it does not hear the house sparrow

 

Swoop up into the air, high enough

To reach the spider. Few leaves rustle,

 

While the whole world simply moves forward.

This is the Saturday business of the immense

 

Backyard conglomerate at work.

If one listens, one might hear

 

The great, bustling city of it all,

The small sirens and screams,

 

The caterpillars backing up,

The geckos at their mysterious work.

 

Victoria Chang, You Are Here Ada Limon, ed. (Milkweed Editions, 2024)

Autobiographia

I had everything and luck: Rings of smoke
blown for me; sunlight safe inside the leaves
of cottonwoods; pure, simple harmonies
of church music, echoes of slave songs; scraps
of candy wrappers -- airborne. Everything.
Mother and father, brother, aunts, uncles;
chores and schoolwork and playtime. Everything.

I was given gloves against winter cold.
I was made to wear gloves when I gardened.
I was made to garden; taught to hold forks
in my left hand when cutting, in my right
when bringing food to my mouth. Everything.

I had clothes I was told not to wear outside;
a face you could clean up almost handsome;
I had friends to fight with and secrets, spread
all over the neighborhood; the best teachers,
white and colored. I'm not making this up.
I knew that I had everything. Still do.

 

G. E. Patterson, poetrynook.com accessed on August 8, 2022 

When I forget that the whole world is holy

When I forget that the whole world
is holy, even the tiny dark bugs
that slip through window screens
and flock and stick to kitchen lights,
even the charred black remains of forest,
even the river as it floods bright red,
even when my cheeks are tear-stained
and my body tightens with fear,
that is when a kind letter from a stranger
arrives in the mail, or the rabbit will stand
on his back legs to nibble on mint,
or the meadow will blaze with the day’s
last slant of sunlight and my heart opens
so wide that inside the fear rises praise.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com July 17, 2024

The Fair

The fair rolled into town surprisingly intact, like a plate unbreakable because it has been dropped and glued so many times that it is all glue and no plate. The fair was no fair. But, oh, it was a thrill! The fair slid into town just as a clown slides into pants. The fit was loose but right. The sheriff  had a job directing traffic. The barber was the sheriff  for a night, and people paid to see a human ape. They frowned to find her happy and alive. The fair spilled into town like a box of tacks. Later that month, in with the rest at church, were people no one knew, though none could tell exactly who was who.

 

Joshua Mehigan, Poetry May 2014

Six Inches

One minute I’m meandering down
a country road on a magnificent fall day,
lost in thought, radio playing,
and the next minute I feel my wheels

on the loose gravel of the shoulder,
there’s a deafening bang and I’m
climbing out of what’s left of my car.
The cop who came to investigate

was pretty sure I’d been speeding
but settled for lecturing me about how lucky
I was to walk away from such a crash,
that I’d be dead if my car had hit the tree

just six inches further to the left.
Anyone could see that what he said was true,
but it also struck me as I stood there
watching his car flash red and blue

that it was equally true the accident
would not have happened at all
if a raging storm some sixty years ago
hadn’t blown an acorn six inches closer

to the road than where it would’ve landed
on a day as sunny and calm as the one
we were in. It was a point I thought deserved
serious exploration—though perhaps

not just then, I decided, with a hundred birds
singing their tiny hearts out overhead
and the sky raining down yellow leaves,
and definitely not with the cop.

 

Jeff Coomer, A Potentially Quite Day (Last Leaf Press, 2015) 

When we still had forests

I was a feather collector.
The hundreds I’d gathered
affixed to yellowing pages:

-goose quills left along riverbanks,
-gull plumes from fast food parking lots,
-down preened by mourning doves.

Now impossible to find. I’m tired
of scanning skies in vain. After
I refresh birdbath water, discard
moldy seeds, refill the feeders, in case,
I’ll hike the once treed escarpment,
scrapbooks snuggled in backpack.

Swallow, sparrow, warbler, killdeer—
feather by feather. I’ll release each one
from the page. Let the wind
lift them into wings again.

 

Kimberly Peterson, poetrybreakfast.com August 8, 2024

Hamburger Heaven

Tonight we find them again,
parked under the stars
(no one ever
eats inside in Heaven),
beeping the tired carhop
with her pageboy and mascara
for a paper boat of French fries
drenched in sauce,
a smashed hamburger baptized
with spices.
They’re sixteen and in love;
the night is hot,
sweet and tangy on their tongues.
Why do we stop?
They’re in Heaven, after all,
listening to the fry cook
in the kitchen
with his savory benedictions,
the AM radio playing
“Love Me Tender,” “Peggy Sue,”
unperturbed by the future with its
franchises and malls, its
conglomerates and information
highways. Is there something
we would tell them?
Here in Hamburger Heaven where
the nights go on forever,
where desire’s resurrected
and every hunger’s filled?
Wait! Do we call out?
But now they’ve seen us
close behind them with our
fervent “Thou Shalt Nots,”
our longings glaring in
the rearview mirror.
And they’ve turned on
the ignition
and they’ve floored it
and are gone.

 

Ronald Wallace, For a Limited Time Only (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008)

Build Up the Ruins

They shall build up the ancient ruins...
                         —Isaiah 61.4

When you are surrounded by broken things,
when you find yourself in a barren place
of devastation and discouragement, take heart.
Blessed are you, for you have been sent by the Spirit
to do the work of love among ruins.
Blessed are you who mend the shattered,
who build up what's been torn down.
Blessed are you who accompany the broken,
who stand with light and hope amid the rubble.

We don't understand the stitching of wounded flesh,
the mystery that knits strands of death into life,
but in the splintered night you can hold the lamp,
you can bear, or at least bear witness to the love
that makes whole, that creates again,
that makes of these disappointed pieces
a new thing of beauty and glory.
The mystery is hidden in your being there.
Build up the ancient ruins, beloved;
the Spirit will guide and strengthen you.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes. unfoldinglight.net December 13, 2023

Taking Out the Trash

I remember as a child
watching my father take out the trash
at the frozen crack of dawn, cursing
as he dragged the stinking cans to the curb,
and thinking, that's not something
I'm ever going to do.

In other ways I was a model son,
standing at the mirror as he shaved,
dabbing the warm cream on my cheek,
dreaming of a razor
and whiskers of my very own.

Watching him light up
as he read the Sunday paper,
one eye squinted against smoke
and bad news, had me reading the funnies
before I could even read, my eye
squinted against nothing.

And the deft, one-handed way
he straightened his fedora's brim,
while at the same time
adjusting the coordinates
of rake and tilt,
makes me regret that the hat,
like my father, has vanished,

along with the strop and razor,
and lathery bowl of curds.
Even smoking, and the Sunday paper
are on their way out.

These are the losses I'm mourning
this morning as I drag the stinking
trash cans to the curb.

 

George Bilgere, writersalmanac.com July 31, 2013

Staying Put

How lucky we are to have found each other
on this huge planet. 

It’s not like we were supposed
to meet at a statue or there had been

any swiping left or right. No, we just danced
at a party, didn't even like each other that much,

so different we are. And yet.
Thirty-eight years later we still love 

a car wash. I still make the banana bread
we had each morning on our honeymoon in Maui, 

still have the index card with the recipe.
Is there a recipe for longevity? 

This morning in the gray light of early morning,
you whispered, "Don't ever leave me."

 

Sarah Dickerson Snyder, Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal February 15, 2024 

'final note to clark (kent)' and 'note passed to superman'

final note to clark

they had it wrong,
the old comics.
you are only clark kent
after all. oh,
mild mannered mister,
why did i think you could fix it?
how you must have wondered
to see me taking chances,
dancing on the edge of words,
pointing out the bad guys,
dreaming your x-ray vision
could see the beauty in me.
what did i expect? what
did i hope for? we are who we are,
two faithful readers,
not wonder woman and not superman.

 

note passed to superman

sweet jesus superman,

if i had seen you

dressed in your blue suit

i would have known you.

maybe that choir boyclark

can stand around

listening to stories

but not you, not with

metropolis to save

and every crook in town

filthy with kryptonite.

lord, man of steel

i understand the cape,

the leggings, the whole

ball of wax.

you can trust me,

there is no planet stranger

than the one i'm from.

Lucille Clifton, POEMS (buffalo.edu) accessed on June 13, 2024