The Poetry Marathon

Against Forgetting ~

It might have been the car’s fault, she told me
this when she lost her way home.
Or possibly I gave her the wrong directions.
To the house we shared??
Perhaps the names of plants she once knew
like those of her four daughters
whom she would lose as well
shook loose with overuse.
Never mind, I reassured her, it’s all okay.
But it wasn’t.

It might have been bad luck, of course:
the kind that seems so much worse befalling
those we love. I knocked on all the woods
I saw, and looked for four-leaf clovers.
It didn’t help.
Nothing did, certainly not time.

Days soon became nameless, as faces lost
context. The names she thought she knew
so well faded into then. And even though
I was against all forgetting, my name
too slipped through the cracks within her.
Until all that remained were the cracks
almost smooth from finger tracing.
A writing that might yet make sense.
Except it never did.

And now, like a softly ticking bomb,
I am still. Against forgetting.

Sevenling

My father was a complex man:
Honourable, wounded, dark of wit & mind
Not always good with children.

These things he also gave into my hand:
Myth & legend, healing, the books I read of every kind,
Family to pass down to children.

I am as contradictory as he was.

Bloodlines (revised last stanza)

It took a move east to resurrect
my Southern roots. To remind me
of the Kentucky in my bloodline
the racists I know well. How they
flourish in the fertile hatred of today.
Always there are reasons. So they tell me.

It took the familiarity of mountains
I had never seen their hazy blue ridges
to heal my seared wounds. Allow me grief.
Worn tops softened by water, these
are the mountains my grandmother
who would not watch a black newscaster
crossed to Oklahoma. They are my bones.

And now the children of her children’s
children’s children mingle black brown white
like the soft silt beneath the resurrection fern.
They paint the landscape with their laughter
in the bright languages of love. Far away from then.

Here among the spruce and fir, hawthorns
berry after dogwood. Tulip poplars reach out
above the ridgelines of the old houses beneath.
A man in Roanoke writes the stories of nooses
and the men & women who hung from them.
Time is a river that erodes the shores of memory.

This is not the state where my young lover
fled a car that ran him over, driver laughing.
Nor is this the state where a friend was warned
Don’t be caught here after the dark you resemble.
That South too is a thread in my mother’s cord.

I have fed from the bloody hands of ‘good people.’
I have noted the excuses for their hatreds, all
in the name of some white god. Perhaps the god
of my grandmother, but not her children’s
children’s children. It took a move east
for me to remember this.

Something more than blood lives within these hills
Something resurrected not from the bones of hate
but from the ashes of forgiveness, that warmed
the coloured mud we grew from. Like the grief I hold
within me, grief I cannot give a name to.
Like the nameless Southern colours neither black
nor white. Like the soft blue mountains
that have seen it all before. Like memory
returning home.

That Monday in Algiers

The door would not unlock.
No key in my pocket. No cell phone
so many years ago to call my white knight

I knocked ~ timid, tentative, as if the knock
spoke another unlearned language, not even
my resurrected Français ~ on the silent door next

Pantomine & speaking hands, fingers turning
imaginary keys in invisible locks. My neighbor
nodded, swung the wood and iron door open

She led me through the two small rooms
to a balcony, once more miming: climb over
she showed me, my nextdoor balcony open.

A small crowd of ragged boys my audience
I swung one leg over wrought iron filigree
another to where I belonged. Inside.

Safe within, I thought of doors & locks & keys.
Of language. Of how so little but so much separates us
wondering still how to unlock these heavy doors

Icarus ~

they were always at my heels
which dangled just above their heads
only sometimes out of reach

some nights they were faces I knew
some nights they were ominous anonymous
some nights I escaped them

the nights they clawed me back to earth
I struggled, overcome by hands like talons
my wings flailing, thrashing against gravity

and whatever earthbound means ~ its own
gravity of inner landscape, the ways ordinary
struggles to clip the primaries of flight ~

their clutching hands wore those meanings
like golden manacles      wore them proudly
secure in their rejection of the sky above them

always they reached from the earth below
minor demons in some avian morality play
while I fought my solitary darkling battle

this, I told myself, is what pride does
what it means to work to learn thermals
& the language of the wind

to tumble every night like Icarus lost
a covert of feathers caught in a wayward breeze
remiges and rectrices in the hands of strangers.

Prompt 5 (hour 4) star image ~

The nights you call to me

you have to see this

your face as bright as Venus

that star we know is love

and here: in the garden

on the patio     outside the door

not laying on a table for discovery

by some medical student

promised your remains

‘just in case it all goes wrong’

The stars almost as bright as fireflies

which cluster like incandescent grapes

within the sheltering branches

of the tulip poplar next door

or those: the fireflies Morse coding

some unfathomable message I know

only because you are here

beckoning me to join you

alive    breathing

as bright as starlight

but closer

The net they caught her in is made of clay
White porcelain in liquid curves stands still
although she walks within the night (and sometimes day)
Exorcist of nightmares, her breath will
somehow infuse me in my anxious sleep:
a Buddhist dreamcatcher. Her slim hands hold
a stick of incense. The curling smoke seeps
into my nightly war, darkness controlled
and held at bay.
                Childlike, I reject reason
although I know she does not really breathe.
Her quiet strength a graceful talisman
knife blade secret within a porcelain sheath.
In plain sight she guards me hour by hour:
Guanyin, at ease within her gentle power ~

Prompt #2 ~ Magic

The red-bellied woodpecker flies over the windshield

We almost collide.

In another world, we do, but there is only wings

now stretching from my shoulders

as my silver hair reddens  and the air lifts it like feathers

Only wings, a hunger for so many decades

for so many earthbound

The wheels continue down the road

You do not notice I am gone

a tethered bird left behind

while I climb the wind into the clouds

Beside you, the bird that wears my face

is still, only her head turning from side to side

as she wonders like I have    like I do still

at these flightless creatures

set free only in the wake of wreckage

I am

the best of the times        I am the worst of times

I am the morning light caught in the mist above the grass

I am wounded darkness bleeding into the horizon

I am water, pooling in a muddy hollow, where a small bird sips

I may be the cat that will leap, breaking the bird’s fragile bones

I am the flight of crows climbing and the vulture in their wake

I am what I know and what I have forgotten, as my mother did

Whatever I am, it is all of this

the hard and the heart-filled

the hungry and the replete. All that I am brims from emptiness

whispering this too I am. This that you seek, this that you fear.

I grew up a third-culture kid, meaning I was an expat/Army brat throughout childhood. Lived on 3 continents before I was 25. Always moving, creating new ‘homes.’ I’m a turtle, in other words. Because I never fit in, issues of translation & culture ground much of my work. A love of other languages and their music also fascinates me: they go ~ like music with lyrics ~ with the images we tend to define as poetry.