Lingering Forever
Her fingers worked the needles and yarn
like she was kneading bread dough blind.
Looking up to gauge my response to what
she had said, she’d knit and knit without pause.
It was not long before I realized that my
mother used to do the same. And somehow
as I sat with this hospice patient, listening
to her tell her tales, one by one I saw the
women of my life enter the room. Mom,
Mom-mom, Mimi, Nanna, Mertz, Karen and
Ruth, Aunt Pat, Aunt Norma, Aunt Betty, Dawn
and Pat joined her, knee to knee, needles tapping out
their cloth. It was then I first knew - deep down -
I carry those women with me - EVERYWHERE.
Those first and powerful women of my life,
they have knitted themselves an endless
blanket of my days even as they were
nowhere in view, just always under the
chatter of knitting, behind the threading of
a needle, or beyond the cutting of their
cloth. Somehow connecting me to
who I would become. Really, no words.
Just their ghostly appearance doing what
they did, all the while as I listened to this
woman slowly dying. And the others.
All the others. Slowly leaving through the years.
They are all in there, in me, lingering forever.
our stories
our stories are what
feed our souls - deep
and on the inside.
in our story we
eat the broken one;
we throw him up on
the table first, divide
his flesh from his blood
and we eat him - after of
course we mumble a few
words. we grind him up
and swallow him and then
he is ours. and then we, we
become the broken ones.
this is to remind us that
not worthy to judge
anyone else - we are
unworthy and we are
as I said before and up
above: broken ones.
the end
the hands of time
sometimes
when i look at
my hands
a weeping wells up
within me
a hoard of hands of
those long gone
display themselves
across the corners
of my mind
sometimes
the hoard of hands
are mine, all mine
from across the sands
of my own time
has the remembering
of my mind left go of
all the countless hours
of joy held near by all
the hands i have known
or, is it just
that all that joy contains
each o’ their meanings
as grains in an endless
hourglass of feeling
so much, so full,
so tenderly eternal
that all the emotions
well up as water across
the lids of my life
sometimes
when i look at
my hands
a weeping wells up
within me
the beauty
the glory of it all
at once
here
and yet not here
Slow Pulling of Air
The slow pulling of air
into the still small space
of the heart, brings a
dropping of all the world
save breathing. Let it fall
to the wayside, to the path
of our own existence. In.
Out. In, again. Mark your
life in inhalations, count
your joy in the departure
of what you just brought
in. Let it go, let it go,
again, just let it go. Ahhh.
Birch-Song
I have seen the birches
just over the hill, as they
line themselves up to
talk among the copse.
They whisper a song on
the morning, and one
again on the setting of
the sun. A song that we
would do well to learn.
Listen closely and you may
pick up the cadence, strain
to make out the meaning
of their lullaby. The secret
of our own future may be
woven within the words.
Listen. Listen. Listen.
Bathed In Words
I’ve been bathed in words.
Surrounded and covered
with all their meaning,
fed and nourished on sound.
From my earliest days
I have escaped into pages
which have led me out of
the chaos and turmoil of
what we called home.
Words have always lifted
me above the fray of human
suffering and angst and into
a world of adventure and
delight. The Scholastic
Book Fairs and the Weekly
Readers were in league
with the library to form
the essential cartographic
tools I would need to craft
the maps and take to flight.
Words are the key for any
one individual to gain the
understanding to be set free;
if not in truth than in point
of fact for their own self.
I am broken by the cheapening
of words I see afoot these days.
Words use to malign and destroy
and not to open us to grandeur.
The silence of the Meetinghouse
has burned the worth of words
into the cells I bear each day. “I
hear an echo in my soul, how can
I keep from singing”, or speaking,
signing, or gesturing to those near
by who need a word of comfort
and repair. Words. Words. Words.
Such a cascade of loveliness and
kismet is possible on opening each
new book; such a hope and exhilaration
with each new journal. “Moby Dick”
the first novel I read in third grade still
portends the rise of hairs on my neck
at the sound of “Call me Ishmael.”
The names De Soto, De Leon, Crockett,
and Boone presage a richness of desire
for new lands and exploration.
I’ve been bathed in words and “THAT
HAS MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE.”
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)