Category Archives: Poetry

When mountains crumble

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Think about it.

Your darkest night

Your loneliest moment

The here-and-there times when it is either your own

Life or the life of the beloved

Taken from you

Faith I get

Love anchors

But it is my squint-into-the-sun-reticence about hope

Which drives me to speak

Of mountains.

Today darling the mountains

Are all shaped like crowns

Crowns of thorns or flowers,

The braided laurels of an imperial victory

He said, it is finished beneath these crumbling mountains

And I will wait, sometimes in tears

To see them all

Thrown into the sea.

Welcome Home, Antarctic Explorers!

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I was there when you packed your bags, when you got the passport pictures, (the garrulous postal employee who took them was a highlight!). I was there for all the worry–the mama worry–and there for the day when we drove to the airport all together

To see you off to

Great Adventure!

Despite all my trepidations, I was excited for all of you. I thought this will be cool and said take lots of pictures!

I went in with my eyes wide open

Too many emails back and forth with grownups

getting paid a lot to take you there

Not Mothers Teresas at all

But I didn’t expect this

The lonely road home

The uphill battle just to get you back home

You are home now, darlings

And never let anyone tell you

You are worth anything less than the whole world entire

I would tell you

If I could stand in every airport in the world

Homemade Sign held high and goofily askew

Letters spelt out–

💜WELCOME HOME, ANTARCTIC EXPLORERS!!💙

You mean the world to me

Winged Victory

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When I was very young we were in Paris and the street vendor said we should buy a small tinny replica of Winged Victory. My mother demurred, said we were going to see “the real thing.”

When we walked into the Louvre and she pointed to it—massive, majestic, breathtaking. I asked how much did that one cost?

She said priceless.

You are my real thing, far more priceless than Winged Victory

The Feast of Thorns

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Long before our terrible story your birthday was already

the feast of Servites pruning winter roses. I cling to that now, all the other days this day could be:

Obstinate mountains lumber into obeisant seas

Lame men whole, blind men see

Dead men rise and shake off their shroudy bindings

impossible things all around ya

If only you will

See

The Invisible World

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Not often enough

Do I think about the light I cannot see

The whole beings made of it who

Could be standing right beside me

defined by light not visible to me

Or smell, or touch or sound or taste

All senses which could be

Stronger somehow–

A male polar bear can smell a mate from 100 hundred miles away

Sharks can smell single droplets of

Blood in the water miles away

What portion of my human brain is cordoned off for

My sense of Love? How far, how long, how wide a net

Will you cast for me?

Planting Daisies

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I pull down the old book, look for recipes for cultivating children, like the time she sewed the earth with dragon’s teeth and made them into men…

I don’t want men

I want daisies

Dozens and dozens, hundreds and hundreds, legions and legions, fields upon fields

Filled with Bellis perennis–beauties everlasting

Because only God can

Make lasting

Children out of words

And wildflowers

From the River

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come at some peril to watch

The wind do what it wills

And the river contend with it

Begetting crests then waves, blues then greens, blues then greens

A million times a million times a million

Breathing in and out, back and forth all the way to the sea

Of clouds above us

Moving fast

haloed in the most unearthly light

Oh ordinary sun, willing to be

Obscured, taken for granted

Like the God who made you

And all your endless

Kin