I walk the dogs and write raw poetry. Won’t you join me?
Elegance of feather-light forms in swirling fluid
cowlicks of wind do-si-do
and the magic falls so thickly that the world beyond the meadow is only ghosts of trees that I cannot hear.
Hush, hush, hush.
Drift away from the world of worries.
Be here and now
in the dance.
Where did the notion come from that there’s a correct way to sleep?
“Awake in the middle and then second sleep”
Has been true since the savannah, since the trees.
I am awake in the middle.
But, consarn it, we’ve stopped saving daylight
Which makes this too early to be too late to go back to bed,
but Second Sleep does not call me. Yet.
scattered on the forest floor,
hooting from deep within the canopy,
encoded in the jumble of color on my daughter’s bed.
Poetry in the scent of my wife and the taste of mangoes in my granola and the dance of eager paws.
Within and without,
created and found,
Sights and words and heartbeats.
by months of Other Things
and summer days and long twilights
and deep sleep and deep loves and complex stories.
All wonderful, chosen things,
but they were not stars and I had lost the thread of the story above me.
I looked up just now, just this morning,
an autumn morning when the Night lingers and the dawnlight keeps its own counsel yet.
I looked up.
There he is.
I don’t want the plates to spin:
I want to admire their porcelain filigree’d edges
and exquisite painted details.
Some are very old with gold leaf highlighting the lacework
and dark pink roses just before the rim.
Some are entirely made by me,
made with silver
and the figures are white on white on white
and I can see them perfectly.
We move, learning.
We flow, moving.
We dance, flowing into patterns which are both organic and new.
And so I invite collaboration and we co-create a new music which none could have achieved separately
The deck responds to waves, tides, currents — changing under my attempts to balance.
and this is how I learn to love the sea.
is more journal than skill,
more inward than blog,
and it’s nice to have a record.
The days on which I do not poem, fine, very well, it didn’t happen today;
but if I go a month, that is a poem as well.
Maybe it is the despair of all the words, tasks, responsibilities, obligations, must, should, ought, could, would, will, expectation, deliberation piling on me in fast-paced attack on my sensibilities and sleep —
Or it is the despair of silence. No words, not even self.
I breathe in Peace,
I breathe out Gratitude.
I breathe in Peace,
I breathe out Generosity.
I breathe in Peace,
I breathe out Love of more Love.
I breathe in Peace,
I breathe out a blanket of touch or of snow to still the inner voice.
I breathe in Peace,
I breathe out Self-Reliance.
I breathe in Peace,
I breathe out Open-Handedness.
I breathe in Peace,
Nope.
This is gonna take more than breathing.
Well, gosh.
Look at that.
I was in the safekeeping of stars.
Thank you.
Begin again.
Three Queens point to Scorpius
which has a particular hold on my attention
and which shows me the way to Boötes
as does Star Bear
and that’s where a bit of falling star flashed for me
this morning
as I stood in darkness
and starlight.
is trash and recycling day,
and it’s quite early,
and I am the only one obligated to be up by a certain time but not out the door,
so the trash and recycling are my job.
I cheat and drive the bins up the steep drive.
But going outdoors means that the dogs wish to get involved,
but usually the car is too packed with bins for them to be inside the car,
but I would be frozen with worry that they were too close to the car to safely run along beside it,
but this week there was room.
What I am trying to say is that Sgiobalta knows that she can no longer jump up into the back seat and she waits patiently for me to lift her.
What I am trying to say is that she even knows that she can no longer hop down from the back seat
and she waited for me to lift her,
and I scooped up by the rough and the hips.
She laid her head trustingly on my shoulder and sighed a memory-filled sigh of resignation.
I have no idea how this adventure will go.
And I’m so excited!!!
she said,
and then there’s poetry.
There are pretty words which capture intense feeling exquisitely,
and then there’s poetry.
I suppose that I am a child of the seventies, still believing that my words are worth writing down and calling poetry.
They make sense in my head. They make sense when I hear them aloud in my head. The pretty words give voice to pieces of my heart that I can’t show otherwise and I thought that was poetry but perhaps it is just journaling. In public. Hmmm. If I threw in some random line breaks, that wouldn’t help either.
It’s true. I am someone’s great aunt.
And great aunts who write poetry are definitely a thing.
And the poetry of great aunts is cringe worthy
(and out of sync with the world, but that’s all right).
Fact: my great-niblings are truly delightful people whom I am glad to know and whom I am glad to count as mine.
Conclusion: it is a privilege to write great-aunt-poetry
and to put the pretty words in an order that pleases me
and shows a little of my heart.