The Poetry Marathon

Curveballs

the horizon rosy

finally a grandchild

scanning the bright sky

unaware that life throws curveballs

I never liked baseball

too static

which is part of my horizon

but not this moment

where a yellow brick road

stretches into blue mountains

and all that lies ahead

is misty promise

a child    a new beginning    light

and a curveball ~

the past draped about us like a cloak

 ~ after Diana Khoi Nguyen

the cloak of the past hangs so very heavy

hobbles my movement through the present

hides any futures

I shake my head to loosen its dark folds

but only flickers of light make it through

so much these days is dark

somewhere, light is its own mantle

this is the song I sing to myself: light hope

each another kind of cape

so that when this cloak threatens to smother

I stumble forward        hands outstretched

singing

Caffeine? 👍🏼

Snacks?👍🏼

Ready?👍🏼

Good luck, folks! Remember to enjoy the ride, not just the hourly destinations!

My first poetry half-marathon was 9 years ago. There were about 100 of us. Now, there are more than 500 of us, from all over the world.

That’s one of my favourite things about the poetry marathon, being a small part of a global poetry family. I’ve made friends here whom I’ve never met f2f. And yet I feel close to them, through poetry.

Last year, less than a month after my beloved died, I still did 12 poems in 12 hours, and it helped. As poetry always does. Some of it was even decent 😉. This year, I expect to once again read our amazing work, and be surprised by what I write down.

I’ve been writing all my life, literally. Scribbling lines on my grandmother’s blackboard, filling little notebooks with more scribbles, eventually doing journalism and academic writing and nonfiction and… poetry. So here we go, writing and reading and sharing. Together! Good luck!

We gather together ~

We ‘gather’
in echo chambers,
scorning the company
of the ‘other,’
that dangerous believer
of untruths, of fake news,
of demagogues new & old…
We gather to scorn and mock.

And yet mothers still love
their children, red & blue alike.
And the young still cradle cats
while their elders stroke the fur
of rescue dogs, the feathers of birds.
We are still the children of love.

In the temple of the banyan tree

set within the circle of a zoo

where men were kept in tiger cages

and children held out sugar cane

to friendly elephants

I saw where gods lived.

On the fragrant curls of incense

deeply smoked into the banyan’s

ropy branching coiled walls

god(s) floated, whispering

a name I did not recognise

from church.

This, I knew at once,

was where god(s) lived.

Here among the tree’s silver

grey limbs, cradled in its coiled branches,

mystery and wisdom played cards

bargaining for knowledge.

Nothing has changed

although memory patinas like an amulet

and I am trying to remember

what I heard so long ago & far away

in the temple of the banyan tree

just beyond the boundary of childhood

There was a bamboozled baboon

Who ate all his fruit with a spoon

The spoons were a set

and thus hard to get

especially when sold by a goon

My grandsons ask for tea ~

Tea, GiGi! Tea!

They like it English fashion:

hot black tea with milk & sugar

served in a Beatrix Potter cup.

The way my own two sons drank it

the way I drank it as a young woman

long ago & far away. Before

there were rabbit cups & saucers.

And strong mint tea, served

in ornate glasses, gilded traceries

along the rims. Syrupy with sugar,

held carefully between fingertips.

And cool herbal teas, tall & frosty

with condensation, sweet with fruit

& Demerara, stirred with my mother’s

sterling spoon, on my grandmother’s saucer.

Tea’s steam rising    curling

winding around us like a daisy chain

holding us together. Memory

blossoming along its links.

They might have been eggs     pebbles of sodalite or chalcedony

nestled within wooden cups        three and four to a family

It’s what they looked like: eggs lain by some prehistoric bird

bright of wing and long of beak, legs drawn up like cranes do

soaring over unmapped lands long since lost to us

While the fierce mother of these unhatched rocs (mythic, stifled)

waits somewhere in another era, a timeline far removed from now.

She broods, a harpy eagle of sorts, her face not quite human

not quite avian. She is other, mother of rocks that once were eggs

now metamphorsed into stone, no longer flesh of her flesh

no longer responsive to a soft whirring of wings.

In this other mother’s world, there is no partner to mourn with her

only the cacophony of a forest I will never know, although her solitary

state is familiar. I too await misfortune on my own, now.

And the small bluegreen stones that once held the possibility of flight

nestle still in wooden hollows that are all they will remember of a home.

We will not see another dawn together.

Nor will we watch the day deepen to dark.

And all those hours of wondering whether

we should have stayed, or left, or disembarked

are now behind us, as you too recede.

The chair you sat in moves within the wind

(I watched two chipmunks play tag at its feet)

and tried to conjure you rocking again.

It didn’t work: your place remains empty.

As does each room, the entire house, the bed ~

I don’t allow the memories to tempt me.

What am I saying?? I know that you are dead.

I know it all too well, but not, my heart,

just how to deal with all of this…apart.