My heart keeps beating –
a sonar searching empty waters,
sounding the barren depths,
waiting for an echo to return.
What are my arms for
if not to hold you?
Mortality
We bear, in each one of us,
A world of sorrows.
Even our moments of gladness
Are made heavy with the weight of our vulnerability.
“Hold on to this – it is fleeting!
It may not come again!”
Our sweetest joys
Are tempered by this truth.
We are flames that burn so bright,
So beautiful,
That flare and in a moment, gutter.
But it is this reality—
Our ephemerality,
Our brief mortality—
That makes us near-divine.
The angels, who do not change
Or age or die,
Look upon us in awe.
We who are gifted to love,
And sacrifice,
And lose,
And grieve,
And endure.
We are most like the eternal God,
Who lives outside of time
In the ever-present “Now,”
When we are captivated by
A fragile moment – one of the short span we are given.
Our weak mortality shoves us closer to the immortal.
The Rose
The moment a rose is cut,
It begins to die.
Even if left on the bush,
It inevitably withers.
For this reason, its splendor
Is so stunning.
Its briefness is its glory.
We are flowers,
Faces lifted toward the sun,
And in our twilight,
Our beauty is not diminished
By its brevity.
Gander’s Grief
The Canada goose,
Branta canadensis,
Mates for life.
I see them in pairs
With their gaggle of goslings,
Escorting the young ones across roadways
To the pond near my home.
They stare reproachfully
At oncoming cars
And waddle at a leisurely pace
Without breaking stride,
More haughty and confident
Than most humans crossing the road.
But one morning as I drove to work,
I saw one whose hauteur could not protect her
From a distracted driver, late for a meeting across town.
She lay at the gutter,
Still and plump and perfect.
The breeze ruffled her plumage,
But she did not stir.
Nearby, on the other side of the road,
Stood a gander.
He paced the green but would not leave.
Was he lost without her?
Did the lonely years stretch out before him then?
His lifelong mate, stolen too soon,
A listless string of solitary days
Until his days ran out?
Does the goose understand such things?
I do not know,
But I saw the gander’s grief
And it touched me.
My own heart grew heavy
Under the weight of solitude
And love cruelly extinguished.
How beautiful and terrible his vigil—
I too know the gander’s grief.
Splinter
I’ve grown hard over time
Protective bark covering me
A shield, a barrier
Between the pummeling winds
And my vulnerabilities
I’ve grown taller and stronger, yes,
But rigid, brittle
So that no one can touch me
Without getting a splinter
Give me a sapling heart again
Let me bend, supple and low
In those same winds as before
But now, dappled shadows welcome
Those who would draw near to me
And I become a soft place to land
Let the oak-knots unwind
From my neck and shoulders
As I relax and shed the toughened bark
Which prevented me from feeling anything
Pearls
The years slip like pearls off a string
They scatter senseless
Across the floor
I’m left holding a thread
And nothing more
This Act of Writing
You are a writer,
so you know
that it is a terrible thing–
this act of writing.
You make yourself vulnerable with every word.
Even more so with poetry.
You must distill the truth about yourself
into something quickly consumed
and easily judged.
Few things scare me,
but this baring of the soul
is exquisite anguish.
Song of the Cicadas
Sometimes I can still feel
Your fingers tracing lazy circles
On my shoulder
Your arm draped around me
On a summer’s night
The taste of honey and whiskey
On my tongue
The song of the cicadas
Humming beneath the lines of Shakespeare
As we watched a play in the park
A phantom touch
That feels like yesterday
And not years ago
NPM: Fresh Glory
Two cardinals hopped
Through the budding branches
Of my Japanese maple today
A mated pair
And I was transfixed
By the color of the female
Normally, the males are revered
For their vivid red hue
So bright and unusual
But her tones were subdued
And sublime
The colors of the dawn
Soft cream, pale yellow
And the flush of purest rose
She was the morning sky
The promise of a new day
Unmarred, unsullied
And to me, her subtle beauty
Far outshone her flashy consort
There is fresh glory in the overlooked–
In nature
And in us
NPM: Acquaintances
Have you ever watched
As the crawl of time
And the sprawl of distance
And the weight of responsibilities
And the busyness of the mundane
Turned dearest friends
Into acquaintances?
I looked about myself one day
Like a shell-shocked soldier
And wondered how this happened.
How did I end up here alone?
As if I wasn’t at the helm
Of my own life
And this was all an unpleasant surprise
Rather than the result of
The choices I made
Woman With a Pen 