BACKDOORCAT
April 30, 2008 at 7:04 am | In animals, poems | Leave a CommentTags: cats, free verse, personification
Marmalade is a lynx, a leopard,
a lion, remembering the wild.
She sits at the screen door,
yearning to go; to forage,
to hunt and collect the smells
of the alley.
She’s been there – she knows !
But there’s traffic and rainstorms,
dogs and mean boys. It’s not safe for her.
No one to feed her – no one
to purr for.
But she’s addicted.
Ash Wednesday
April 29, 2008 at 4:03 pm | In Self, poems, spirituality | Leave a CommentTags: "sin"ical humor, Sonnet
On Tuesday I put on my sackcloth robe,
reminder of my true unworthiness,
and sit down in the ashes, where I probe
my inmost self with ruthless thoroughness.
Before I throw the ashes on my head
I carefully arrange my sleeves and skirt
to best display my penitence and dread
of judgment, which I know is my desert.
On Wednesday my Lord smiles at all my woe.
“Do you not know,” says he, “what I have done
to save you all this pain? You worry so!
Stand up! I’ll brush you off. Your sins are gone.”
And so his loving touch clears all away
except this ashen cross to mark the day.
The Gift
April 29, 2008 at 10:37 am | In Self, fantasy, poems | Leave a CommentTags: fantasy, free verse, ownership
I bought a small gift, one I truly coveted and
could easily have decided
not to donate to the prize table.
But its winner, knowing, gave it back to me.
I wonder, do I own or am I owned by things?
But when this thing was “mine,”
it wasn’t mine.
It was its own, un-ownable.
A beautiful, graceful whisk broom, long, cylindrical,
with twirling bristles of gold and sepia and not-quite-red
bursting from its tightly bound handle.
Each strand of her full, straw skirt turns slightly in one direction.
She twirls. She enchants. She is her own.
Like all angels.
With Apologies to Phillips Brooks
April 29, 2008 at 10:27 am | In poems, seasons, spirituality | Leave a CommentTags: christmas, free verse, hymn quotqtion
I like to think the Babe
was born at midnight;
the stroke of time that
opens each new day.
“How silently,” the poet said,
“the wondrous gift was given.”
So in the darkest time of
any day of any life,
the hope breaks through
with dazzling light,
“and Christmas comes once more.”
From a Young Girl
April 29, 2008 at 8:47 am | In childhood, poems | Leave a CommentTags: rhymed verse, youth
Everything opens and closes; doors and days,
eyes and ears, minds, seasons, a pickle jar,
mouths and years and books and Broadway plays.
And my heart, if you know where the buttons are.
Living in Leviticus
April 29, 2008 at 8:25 am | In Self, childhood, poems, spirituality | Leave a CommentTags: Biblical reference, blank verse
I remember saying to my brother, Don,
“You be the Dad and I will be the Mom”
when we “played house” so many years ago.
Oh, what a perfect family we were,
with no discord, and kids who found that they,
in make-believe, know only what was good.
So when I found these words, I felt again
the rooms of that small house beneath a tree
where we had hung a sheet to make the wall.
Your voice says clearly I need have no fear;
your promise is my talisman of hope:
“You will be my people, I your God.”
The Poet
April 28, 2008 at 4:58 pm | In Self, poems | Leave a CommentTags: humerous, rhymed verse, writing poetry
I’ve tried free verse. I cannot find the way
through my own thoughts without a metered line
to guide me. Why, I ask, can I not say
in freer form what is so easily voiced
in numbered feet? The imagery would show
that this is poetry so readers need not
be at any loss. And yet I’m doomed to go
on counting, rhyming, parsing and I guess
it’s dash, hook, dash, hook, dash I’ll always see
in my mind’s eye – but joined with many greats
like Shakespeare and John Donne who loved, like me,
to hear their iambs in pentameter.
Friends
April 27, 2008 at 2:07 pm | In eternal life, nature, poems | Leave a CommentTags: blank verse, nature, personification
She lived on Michigan’s shore, no vast estate,
but just a house. White clapboard, dormer windows
looking on her shoreline; a few feet
of rocks and thorny bushes, but no dock
to moor a boat, or sandy beach to walk.
Widowed in youth, she’d lived here fifty years
with memories, of course, but recently
with thankfulness for having reached an age
where she need not go out to work, but take
the time to visit with her friend, the lake.
Hers was a small, neat porch, where she’d sit
for hours at a time, and watch the curls
of gray-white water smash against her rocks,
spaying the air with drops of mirrored light
that never failed to teach and to delight.
What did she learn from this, her inland sea?
Well, peace that comes from knowing what comes next.
The water, always true to its own ways
taught her to see her own reality,
and then to understand eternity.
From East of Eden
April 27, 2008 at 1:54 pm | In poems, spirituality | Leave a CommentTags: Biblical reference, murder, rhymed poem
Oh, Abel, my field was marked by your blood,
now my forehead is marked to save mine.
I sent you away for ever in death;
God keeps me in life by this sign.
But if only I had withheld my hand,
we’d both now be rising from sleeping,
and you’d be off to tend your flocks,
and I to my sowing and reaping.
Another day of yearning for home,
and a night in the land of Nod.
How can this be protection
at the hand of a loving God?
Rather I’d die in this foreign place
or suffer any pain,
than never to touch my brother’s hand
or see my field again.
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