We’d Like
We’d like to just sleep.
We’d like to just eat.
We’d like the stars to just
shine down on us—
we’d like it all
to be simple.
We do sleep, eat.
The stars do shine down on us,
but it rarely feels simple.
We can try to look away
but that won’t cut that connection
that binds each to all,
all of us under those stars,
wanting to eat,
sleep,
shine.
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Another little poem for April. Have a good day! Thanks as always for your time and kindness.
TGIF
Friday brings possibilities.
There are mystery novels that may be read
where all the unexplained
will be resolved.
There are walks to be taken
that may veer
from the road.
There should be time to tease you
gently, and, laughing,
to be teased.
Recrimination just might de-crimp, given
some room, and regret let itself go,
at least a little.
As the work week cools,
self-castigation dulls, like a saturated fat that turns solid
at room temperature—solid and stolid,
and relegated to some jar
over there.
Outside, clumps of daffodils
that have survived spring snow
hold their heads sunny-side up.
Just writing that makes
me hungry.
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Another drafty poem for April! I know the pic doesn’t quite go, but there it is! Have a good day.
PS – this post has been edited since first posting as I dropped the T from the Title!
Hybrid
She was not like other birds. She knew that, and knew also that it might be a problem.
So, before entering the greater world, she tried to signify that she came in peace, by wearing olive leaves on her brow.
Getting the leaves stay up there was no easy task. (Of course she could not just carry them, what with her wings.)
The webbed feet did hold the branches in place upon the ground, however, and her nose, though not a beak, was rather long for a nose—useful that.
And, of course, the teeth helped.
So she managed, amazingly, to tear the leaves from a handy branch, and to weave a little circlet, which, when she saw her reflection in her pond’s still surface, looked rather handsome, she thought.
But pride, perhaps, goeth before a fall. For though the crown stayed on well enough, it did not seem to get its message across so clearly—the message of peace.
At least other birds were flying straight towards her now with intentions she could not gauge.
Yes, she was big, awkward. So, she had been made. She worried that they would hold that too against her.
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A little illustrated snip of a story for April. I took down yesterday’s poem, as it just felt too grim and too graphic as the day went on. Crazy times. Stay well.
This is a poem I posted in April, but took down as some of the imagery felt too graphic, and (possibly) open to misinterpretation. I’ve changed and am reposting below. Sorry for the repetition.
Need
I need to get back to the belief that the universe loves us.
I also need to buy shoes.
I understand that the universe does not necessarily love us
in the way that we want to be loved;
it doesn’t care if we have a long life
or suffer pain.
Don’t get me wrong—it doesn’t want us to suffer pain.
It’s just that a universe in which trees split in the wind
and stars are born and die with fiery outcries,
may not understand pain.
I cannot think about those tortured in the Ukraine
and I cannot not think
about them.
Even when I don’t want the images—hands tied behind the back,
and much more horrible things—bullets through
eyes–
It helps to worry about shoes. Almost none of mine will work as warmth
approaches.
It’s ridiculous. Still, I imagine trying to run after a young child in sandals,
the young child someone else’s but in my care.
and I don’t think I can trust
sandals.
I dream about—I don’t want to write what I dream about
for fear of imprinting it further—
How did people feel in the 1930s and 40’s,
the Great Depression, World War II?
My mother, one of those people, once told me she kept wondering
when it would all end—
will this never end, she said she wondered, thinking that when it did at last end,
she could finally start
her own life,
a life that was ongoing all the time she waited
to start it,
and is now (as we think of life) long over,
always the universe loving her, us,
in its way.
I need to get back to that.
*******************************************************
Another draft poem for April. Sorry I’ve missed a few days, crazy internet issues that knocked out my momentum (such as it was!)
Note that all these poems are drafts of a sort–of course, I’ve re-written them some, but they are poems that can probably benefit from more thought! And more thought might actually cause me to put them in the recycling bin! I appreciate your understanding!
After Reading The News This Morning
It’s hard to believe after a day not reading the news
that everything is still going on; the bad still happening
so badly,
even as daily life
perseveres (clocks tick, light
shifts, spring tries.)
Wind shook the windows last night—it felt like winter
clinging to the leg of the countryside, wailing please don’t go,
only it’s winter that must
move on—
Everything seems reversed like that—
the blowhard shaking
what he can—
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Another poem for April—I don’t think the drawing fits so well, but it’s late!!! Have a good night!
Power Outage
The darkness feels thicker than regular darkness.
I lift one arm to test it, expecting to need
a swimming stroke,
only when I type that, it comes out as “warm harm”
instead of “one arm,”
maybe because I am worrying about a candle that burns down in the kitchen,
and the kettle that I have also left to heat
on the hand-ignited gas
stove.
The unattended candle, kettle,
feel foolish,
so I imagine wrapping my blanket
about my shoulders and
stepping down the treacherous-in-the-darkness stairs
to check on it all,
yet still I sit, blanket
over my legs, listening
to the hum of the kettle, the taps
of my typing, the farther silence that follows a dog’s bark
down a nearby road, and also the
slight tinnitus of which I am suddenly conscious,
an internal chorus of cicadas.
I look up to the room, amazed somehow
that all its physical, unelectrified contents, are exactly
as they should be, even more so—
the window panes, the chair, the pictures—
me beneath the blanket, warm, unharmed,
and, I am conscious now, not only of the tinnitus,
but of the great blessings that I have
been given, so unearned.
I am almost afraid to think of them,
as if some spirit of the universe
might say,hey!— and correct the
imbalance.
A lantern sits to my side, blowing glitter
about its glass, and also about
a stiff little cardinal that sits
on a twisted wire tree.
White-stuccoed gimcrackery that somehow manages
an immense beauty
simply in the way
that it circulates light.
The walls dance with it.
***************************
Another poem for April. Written early this morning. (Nothing burned down.)
Have a good night.
Why I often get up at 5 (Or a Little Before)
No one can expect anything from you
at this hour.
Maybe there are things you should
be doing, but, hey—it’s 5
in the morning!
You could even make dinner
(you know, in advance),
but no one will think to say
why didn’t you make dinner?
You could do office work, and those times
when you give in, smugness coats
each email like
an underscore.
You do at last make yourself budge from the blanket
you save for these dawn hours in a small not-totally-freezing room,
and find that the morning moon
is in a completely different quadrant of the sky
than seems the norm. Seriously!
It’s veered way over
to the South. (Definitely, South.) But how
does that happen?
You could look it up.
Looking it up is the type of thing many people (i.e. your husband)
would do, but it’s still only 6:09 and he’s asleep,
while you are not even going to let yourself
feel embarrassed
by your lack of intellectual curiosity.
(Okay, okay: so, the reason that the moon changes position in the sky
is that the moon’s orbit around the Earth
is approximately 5.1 degrees offset from the Earth’s orbit around the Sun,
which causes moonrise and moonset to vary to the North or South by as much
as 28.6 degrees.)
Are you happy now?
Yes.
******************************************
The moon, in fact, set way to the South today, and was full, or almost full. I did not get a photo of it though, so here’s a pic from my children’s books, The Road I Like. (The pic doesn’t really suit the poem, as this poet is, thankfully, no longer a commuter!)
Have a good day. (And check out The Road I Like!) (Also, the moon!)
Easter Morning
I could not sleep last night after reading
about what happened to a body
in Ukraine, before that body died.
There’s sickness here too (if not the same.)
But it’s Easter and I get up to tune the computer to boys’ singing
about the resurrection.
The songs make me weep almost instantly,
as all my dead rise
to greet me.
I weep both because of my certainty that those one loves
are never lost, and because of my longing for
that certainty,
weep too for the suffering, and the wish
for the healing of suffering.
And then the day begins, limpingly. It doesn’t really feel like Easter,
until, between the feeding of animals
and almost burning
someone’s cream of wheat,
I turn to a soprano who knows
that her redeemer liveth,
and find in the beauty of her voice, her smiling but determined
enunciation,
a saving grace,
helped along by the sun shining through clouds, and a texted photo
of a baby in an elephant dress,
being held to stand—
They do not take away
what happened to the body
that I read about, or what happens
to any body,
but they say that there is love also, even
at the doorway of loss,
love that rises again,
though it may need to be held
to stand.
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Happy Easter, Happy Passover. Another drafty poem for April. Wishes for All Good.
The Bits
When I have nothing
with which to make
a poem,
I think of my grandmother, who,
after laying out the pie dough in the pan,
the fruit, the lattice interlace—in my gloom, the laying out of that limp dough
feels almost like flesh—but it was not
like that at all—the gloom is not in the memory
but in my current
self—
the point is that after my grandmother composed
the pie, there would be the extras–
the snips of dough she’d cut
from the pie’s perimeter, and all those lopped corners left
on the floured waxpaper—
She would roll those in her hands
into a ball. then roll them with
the rolling pin again,
and I would take a glass and carefully press out circlets,
which we would place on a separate baking sheet, sprinkling
with sugar, and those little round cookies
would be more delicious (at least to my childish taste)
than the whole darn pie—
As you grow old, you sometimes feel that you yourself
are all those bits, your limbs as akimbo as angled dough,
your mind, your life, a bunch of edges that are bridged
by extensive byways, strips of tenuous connection that narrow
and grow wide—this that led to that, that led to that
that led to this and this and this now—
I think of how my grandmother imbued it all
with sweetness, shape—
how one might do that—
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Another rather drafty poem for April. Pic and poem mine; all rights reserved.
I wish a happy Passover and blessed Good Friday and just a good day to you all. Stay well, and thanks. And if you get a moment, do check out my new book of stories. “Who Are You Kidding? and Other Stories of Strange Change.”
Spring Comes
The air feels suddenly as if it’s taken a warm bath and not yet
towel-dried. Your skin wants
to roll around with that air, your skin feels wanton—
it will do almost anything
with that air,
like the tree frogs that now wheedle
from the woods, so anxious
to be chosen—
take me, take me, me, me—
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Here’s a very little poem for April 14. As always, pic and poem are mine; all rights reserved. Have a good day!
ManicDDaily 
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