A voice speaking my name;
out a dark window, the shining moon:
small joys.
Category: poetry
Daily Tasks
Matthew 4:1-11
The courage of grocery shopping
among stones,
in times of hunger.
The courage of refusing a parachute
near the map’s edge,
while demons wait.
The courage of letting go
not paying ransom
for all wishes granted,
All these are our daily tasks.
Good Friday Thoughts
When does death begin?
Before the last breath,
at the diagnosis,
when the symptoms reach consciousness?
A trip and fall in old age,
a desolate, desperate plunge,
as the car skids
on an icy road?
With childhood illness,
at the first breath,
when the sperm
lands on the waiting egg?
When eyes first meet,
as lips and hands touch,
with the grasping embrace
and thrust?
Death begins with life.
Three Glimpses
This cold house shivers and sheds,
waiting for me to leave
and find my home.
—/
Three texts before breakfast
and into the mist
of the climate change day.
—/
Golden willows on the hillside,
Swollen elm tips across the street:
Spring comes.
Aging Hacks
When words hide
in your mouth-mind,
charades speak.
The Impact of Reading
– 2019
Sometimes confusion or an unnamed feeling
explodes,
lit by words bursting
into meanings
previously hidden in darkness and silence.
Rejoice:
a part of your brain has
new synopses
shaping your
Mind.
Time
2016
In youth we come through our bodies as explorers
seeking and measuring,
astounded and disappointed
as we grow into ourselves.
In our long midlife, we travel our path,
forgetting and wandering,
sometimes grateful, mostly blindly seeking
the more we yearn for.
Now, our bodies re-astound us:
aching and refusing,
complaining and attacking,
reminding us of time.
The Teal Curtain
2016
Threadbare, faded, ragged from its many unpackings,
each time, deposited in a different storage -
a teal woven curtain, worn meaningless,
hiding
nothing.
The building that contained it - gone.
the people who lived there - far away, most dead.
A memory of a memory of a memory luminous
once,
flaring again, as it crumbles.
Too Much
2015 & still today!
I have a horror
hangover:
a surfeit of tv news dribbles
repeating
the images and words -
addictive
and numbing.
To look away, to change the channel,
I switch to a story of plotted
murder, where the killer
is named and blamed
and hunted and destroyed -
and it’s over!
When I can’t resist tv news glancing again,
the crowds are still
raging in the streets.
Winter, 7:00 a.m.
I almost wake as I lumber
lurching on sleep-stiff ankles
and return to my night-warmed bed.
In the east, out the window,
I watch the pine boughs shift
and sway and still and shift.
Resting on the next street’s roofs
a pale gold light bleeds upward
behind the narrowing pine,
at the window’s top,
the sky’s grey-white
hints at blue.
Learning Living 