Good women, wives, and mothers,
Sisters, daughters, and the men
Who love us
When we march God smiles upon us
In all Her glorious grace.
You can’t contain our spirit,
Or silence our demands; we’ve come
Too far to turn back now
And this sky remains the limit
Bountiful stars mark our vow.
Mom weighed next to nothing as she lay dying; the hospital bed displaying the decreasing
Pounds like a stopwatch ticking off seconds. I couldn’t take my eyes off the digital
Readout, like maybe if I concentrated hard enough the numbers would reverse themselves.
One twenty seven would read one seventy two and the cancer cells would be rubbed out like
Misspelled words on a fourth grade composition. Little pink eraser dregs lingering,
To be brushed away by pudgy fingers. The marks still visible, but inconsequential. A week
After she died I dialed her number to relay a student’s amusing comment about
The complexity of simple machines, but realized after the third ring that I’d lost her forever.
I could not concentrate enough or erase fast enough to bring her back, to hear her voice.
Impossible, she thought, that decades later the love still held. No one had ever cared for
Her this long and this well. Surprised after the first year when he still woke up beside
Her. Didn’t he know she had so little to give in the way of affection? And yet he mined
Every modicum of goodness, prying tiny pieces and holding them beneath a magnifying
Glass until they caught fire and everyone had to acknowledge their presence. Even her.
Excoriate is one of those wonderful words that comes close to being onomatopoeic, at least in my mind.
One cannot say excoriate without making the harsh, almost abrasive sound reminiscent of sandpaper on wood. The word is one I find myself using often these days, more for its secondary definition than its primary; although, I can make both work in this poem.
EXCORIATE
Come clean, down to the brass tacks with steel wool, superfine grit sandpaper, and elbow
Grease. We hold these truths to be self evident, you elitist bastards, that ALL humans
Equally created have an irrefutable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Try as you might you cannot scrub these words from the collective memory of this country.
Some matters press against the lining of my weary soul. Injustices and inequities abound.
See how the children grow, sweetly innocent, casting about for our undivided attention?
All that the summer child gains, proud accomplishments, another child holds greater
Grace within the sacred sphere. You ignored the offerings of the summer born,
Shrugged aside her efforts. Pierced my heart with your words. Sharp and condescending.
How awful is it that I’ve come across the word “feckless” in reading material pretty much my entire life but never bothered to look up its meaning. I relied on context to get close to the definition, but it’s being bandied about so much in our current political environment that I decided to pin it down and see what Mr. Webster says.
Can I build a poem around it? It’s worth a try.
Feckless
Feckless, rhymes with reckless, but given a choice I’d rather be the latter
At least reckless implies action, foolhardy though it may be
While feckless, ah, that milquetoast adjective, describes a dearth of
Initiative, a failure of character. In a word, Congress.
My heart’s been walking in soul sucking mud, the kind that pulls my shoes right off
As I slog through the muck from point a to point b. Bare feet carry gamely on, step by sticky
Step. Pick up my shoes and brace myself against gravity’s ultimate challenge. Falling
Face first into the mire is a real possibility. I’ve been here before. It’s not pretty.
I heart you
Sounds oddly
Painful
Like, I hit you,
or
I smite you.
St. Valentine was
Martyred,
Though, so
I reckon
I heart you
Is fitting.
He stood inside the circle of light, hat in hand, a glorious fedora.
She stumbled in the dark, caught her heel on a paving stone, stifled a giggle.
Crickets and frogs and hoot owls witnessed their coming together.
He dropped his hat, she kicked off her shoes, their lips met unerringly.
“This feels like a movie,” she whispered.
“You feel like a tree,” he sighed.
“CUT!” Called the director. “For the hundredth time, its dream. ‘You feel like a dream!’ Sheesh, it’s gonna be a long night.”
Torrents of mid-winter rain drown fallen leaves of oak, carrying the lucky ones Downhill
On shimmering ad hoc rivers until they meet on the banks of a temporary lake. Golden clumps
Cluster forlornly in pre-spring purgatory awaiting the salvation of rake and wheelbarrow.
Praying for Eyebrowz 