Lest We Forget
I do not forget the great comrade,
The wonder song of the morning bird,
And how night multiplies the seed of the sun.
A Mother to All Children
A Mother To All Children
She sits quiet in her beauty
Entering her room,
Like tea pouring from a kettle
Soft, warm light will lower shoulders.
History and piano lightly circulate
While her gentle voice soothes the weariest of bones.
A mother to all children.
She is hydration
And every little decoration
Is delicate.
Her tapestries rich,
Clothing a muted landscape
Holding her fleshy, full bodice –
Onlookers notice.
Is charity her name?
Is grace her vocation?
Relief is as effortless as breath.
Pure is the taste of her intimacy.
Sweet salvation and naturalness
Even the breeze can see
Taking pause by her window
To smell her air, sweetly.
This moonsong woman
Wildly and wonderfully bathing
In the complexity of her wildlife.
In her company, nature sighs.
And therein lies –
Hope.
You Are Nature To Me, Too
You Are Nature To Me, Too
I create beauty
And sink my toes into the sand
I dissolve away any heartache
Or reluctance for you to be my man.
You are nature to me, too,
And cosmic forces be damned
All I want is to love you
But you don’t have to be my man.
It’s only me and you and God in this room
So open your eyes and see,
Sink your toes into my carpet
And run your hands up my dress slowly.
Men carve names into my bark
And rip leaves off branches as they pass by
But you plant flowers at the base of my roots
And nourish my soil in ways I can’t quantify.
I am certain there is no one like you
And that my heart only reads your name
Your colors are a brushstroke of genius
Unbeknownst to me, your everything laid claim.
As native and inherit
As the sky is blue
So effortless and unsurprising
God taught me how to love you.
Two days early or two days late,
I hear you just the same
Fold into my arms, we have an entire fire to burn
And my real love for you is an eternal flame.
Scraping Pavement
Scraping Pavement
There’s truth in these walls
songs in our sunsets and yet
we ask them to be repeated.
Declaring our strengths as listeners but
can you recite the birdsong melody
outside our window?
I can no longer draw inspiration
from my feet on the ground.
With a heart half-healed, and a fate
yet to be revealed,
the leaves scrape the pavement
like my dragging heels.
Remember Me
Remember Me
Sometimes I need to write.
To see words flow from my hands.
Disrupting the white paper with
My black, black ink.
It settles my stomach to see
It dry.
It’s there now – my words.
The message isn’t always important.
It could be a reminder or something more
Revealing like a love note.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is
The permanence.
Educated
Educated
The trees taught me how to whisper,
While the clouds showed me grace.
The sweet little fawn liked carrots, like I did
And the birds were the ones that told me to fly away.
Tiptoeing on pine needles,
I asked to befriend the crickets
So they would let me lay with them at night.
But eventually, the blossoms had to bid me goodbye
As I kissed my last dragonfly,
The one that sat on top of the cattail
By my family’s old pond.
The one I would plunge into to scream or cry
And on my way out, soaking and wrecked
Would eat the blackberries that hid under the deck.
I used to hide too,
Under our soon-to-be Christmas trees
That lined my family’s property.
Those old woods feel haunted to me now.
A grown woman staring at grass
And all the memories that have now come to pass.
The streams all dried up.
The light dimmer than it was,
Calling it home, just because.
Nostalgia smells different to a girl like me.
What I lacked in lullabies and story time
What I may have missed from board games and birthdays
I was given.
I was given countless kisses from the rain
And tickles from the leaves
An imagination on fire.
Nature gave me the gift of listening
She warmed me with her blanket of sun
And granted me a life being forever young.
When we live among giants,
Like the great eastern white pines of Michigan
How can we feel like we do not have teachers?
The rings of their age
Their wisdom and their sage
They are the religion,
Our most literate preachers.
For my next breath, I will have the space to look up
The seeds are planted, and my roots are deep
For the sky reminds me to be big.
It Is All For You
It Is All For You
It’s just you in this field,
But I’m here too.
You breathe me in
And don’t even notice.
Your words drift on my wind
As your hands graze my grasslands
But your eyes look past my mountains.
My birds sing for you
And my branches always reach out
Asking only for footsteps in return,
I’ll give you all of me.
I Am A Woman For You
I Am a Woman For You
I had a dream about you
We were walking down the street
As we always did,
As we always do,
In my memories of you.
We were friends,
Once friends,
And you spoke to me
About your body
With self-deprecating cruelty.
Sharp my lungs
As I faced you
Pulled you
Into me so close
By the latch of your jeans
To prove a point of what I mean.
My hand began to reach up your shirt
You squirmed and became instantly alert
As my other hand
Wrapped around your neck.
Almost uncomfortable
Almost too comfortable.
I positioned my lips
A hairline away from your burning ear.
Burning to hear
Burning to be near.
As I spoke with conviction
Without any contradiction
And with a soft, feminine tone
That only increased the friction,
In the air, and simply everywhere.
“You are
Tirelessly,
Completely,
And unrelentingly
Desired.”
My hand drawing paths
Down your back.
Impatient to tour your hip
And as I turn my fair face
With my hair slightly out of place
And yours…
I continued,
“Everything about you,
From your hands,
To your heat,
Your chest,
Your smell, this skin,
And your mouth
Remind me that I am a woman.”
Waking up,
From this long-remembered dream
With peace in my bloodstream
Power in my pulse
And trembling my legs
Oh, to be a woman.
Beyond the Daydreams
Beyond the Daydreams
I want to see beyond the dreams
Share with him and share within
A gratitude for our coincidence.
And despite the restrictiveness
Our daughter requires innocence.
She needs us to take time
Sweet and merciful
Born from our patience.
Tasting truth on my tongue
And strawberries on his.
Poor little boy is afraid of falling
We are children making children
But my tender heart is calling.
I know your daydreams
As my light is learning you.
There is no fear in faith
And as we play, and as we pray
As we cry and move
In all the daily things we do,
We will learn a love that she deserves.
We will learn a love that we have waited for,
A remembrance of the peace before.
The space where breath is made.
Like nature or grace
It will come from an effortless place.
On that day, when my belly is full of life
And your hand is rested on our blooming flower
We won’t remember this waiting hour.
Our only thought,
I wonder what color her eyes will be?
Before You
Before You
The stars dream of us
And the flowers stretch out to smell you.
At night when the lights go out,
Trees giggle about our silly conversations.
While a neighboring flood lamp flickers a moon-like glow into my hallway,
Where my socks still lay.
I don’t remember what it felt like before you.
Why would I want to anyway?
Purpose and Prose 