Poem-a-day catchup

#53 F3

It’s just us two here:
Me, and the whole wide world.
Humans didn’t stay,
One of us was too big for them.
Last year I ripped up flowers
Bending the tiniest part of the world to my will
Cradled my offspring under lights all winter.
The ravens watch over me
And take their share in exchange
A reminder that flesh always tears
In the end.

I am the meaning-maker,
My stories stitched together to support
The weight of my demanding mind
My life bigger than the compass of my memory
Glutted with years of joy
And honed by solitude.
I always watched across the room
Watched you,
Watched myself,
Told stories as kindly as I wished they’d be told about me.

In the beginning I named myself
And like any good spell the name remained
While the world burned the rest away.
In the beginning I named myself
And like any good self I remained
While the world burned away.

When the story is complicated there’s an ending close behind
No one can abide uncertainty
At least I can’t, and the wide world isn’t talking.
The flowers I ripped up last year are growing.
It’s just us two here.
Humans didn’t stay.


#54 Global warming as a failure of relationship 3

Humans once said they yearned
For the nature they actually spurned
They judged it by looks
And wrote lots of books
Any wonder the atmosphere burned?


#55

There's something about that last glimmer of light,
Sky some sort of deep aquamarine and bright enough
To show up the wind-tossed aspens as they hiss against it.
You don't understand, it may have been light this late,
Until an hour before midnight,
In the city too. But if it was
There were too many streetlights
And it never made a difference.

The sky is glimmering. The aspens are hissing. The fan tosses white noise and breeze into my warm attic-shaped room. Summer is beginning, and I am home.

Poem-a-day catchup

#56

It starts like magic
Not just the magic of regular beginnings
But with a small child in the kitchen
Learning to read from a book of spells

Spells of abundance,
Creativity,
Satisfaction:
The alchemy of transforming marked-down
Leftovers
Into something good for the spirit
As well as the body.

Though the magic serves well
It’s not always easy,
Standing in front of the fridge
Spellbook in hand
Staring blankly. Or,
Tired at the end of the day,
Eating half a loaf of store bread and some water.

In the middle there are such
Comfortable
Days. The before-coffee rhythm of
Scooping flour,
Measuring salt and baking powder in the palm,
Cutting butter in,
Pouring milk by eye.
The warming oven pings in the bite
Of morning air through open windows
And the cats rub perilously at ankles below.
The rhythms of this magic
Are a dance that can be done in sleep.

Sometimes it’s showy:
A duet in the kitchen now
And two families brought together in a spell for
Contentment
With all their needs met.

The beginning, the middle,
And though the end is not written
I know it will contain magic.