The Poetry Marathon

The New Red

A concrete forest’s Red Riding Hood
has enlisted her helpers.
Who better than sly red trickster fox
to sniff round corners, in building stoops
for shifty wolves?
Who better than big black bear
to shelter and protect?
Off to Granny’s they go.

Tracy Plath

Back Burner

Picking up my children from my former home
was a practice in diplomacy, anger restrained
as I wove around broken machinery, lumber,
animal waste, in a yard I had kept pristine.

Welcome home, I muttered to myself, wrinkling
my nose against the stench of livestock roaming
freely, finally arriving at the front door, hearing
How are you? through the broken screen door
from an ex who had observed my painstaking
path, and more than likely wished me dead.

Fine, thank you, I replied through the choking, red
rage in my throat as I awaited the outside arrival
of my children, eager to sweep them swiftly away
to the clean comfort of my own new home, my
parting shot on our way to the car: Have a nice day.

Tracy Plath

Transplanted

The creature darted across midday’s blistering parking lot,
sheltering in the shade of one car, then another, as I watched
through the glass of a doctor’s office door in my new home town, cool within.

It was lean and low to the ground, with tufts of fur rakishly angled
atop its erect ears, steel grey from a quivering nose to the tip of a long,
gorgeously full tail, an animal never to be imagined in this nearly treeless desert.

Its unmistakable silhouette, though skinnier and of a different color,
transported me in time and suddenly I’m homesick for green grass,
swaying walnut trees, and the evening rush of wind from an incoming storm.

Another hotfooted padding across the parking lot brought me back from
sleek, red squirrels scurrying and chattering through Indiana trees, to this pitiful,
flattened, grey cousin, straining to survive, a transplant to this dusty western town.

Tracy Plath

Broken

The long, sustained dream of my happy childhood was snapped,
before and after pieces felt and mourned at far too young an age.
A broken heart, the unseen inner portion of a secretly broken body,
brutalized by a teen boy who really should have known better.

He lured my six year old self to a garage roof hideaway, sheltered
by surrounding trees and vines, with the heady promise of friendship,
unseen. When he’d finished with me blood was cleaned from my legs,
and away I was sent, on my little banana seated bicycle back home.

My solitary soul squeezed itself down into an inner oblivion, to forget,
to move on, to determine to myself to live, my loving family in no way
to blame for my brokenness, yet all the while I knew at far too tender
an age that evil really does exist, and can look handsome to the eye.

Tracy Plath

Where the Mind Dwells

I will live in the country where the mind dwells,
a permanent resident of the nation of thought.
My body will wither and fade, physical pleasures
lose their meaning, but my mind will tick
and sputter its way on through to eternity, and still
I will live in the country where the mind dwells.

Tracy Plath

Speak From the Heart

We’re taught to think that the heart is the strongest  muscle,
as it nearly never fails to pump for most of life’s
hoped long span. In fact the strongest muscle is the tongue,
yet its failure will rarely kill as surely as the heart’s.
A random checkup caught a leaky valve not squeezing
blood completely through and away within the chambers
of my elder son’s young heart. He’ll be alright, we were told,
It’s nothing, were the words said, speaking platitudes
for life and death that angered, yet all the while we hoped
for the bitingly ironic truth: that the tongue actually is
stronger than the heart, that platitudes can speak health
into reality, that he will be alright, and that a slowly leaking heart
really is nothing at all.

Tracy Plath

Great Expectations

The yearning for green things, growing things,
fruits and flowers, begins in the deep and dark of winter.
Savvy garden magazines know this, tease and taunt
in gorgeous, full color photo spreads, the perfection
I can expect for our yard if I buy, buy, buy.

I fall for it, eagerly await the arrival of tender sprigs,
bare woody roots, and naked seeds to gently space,
immerse, water, and watch. Into the early summer
they flourish, growth and weight added, springing
height upwards, buds beginning to take shape.

Summer in the desert tells its own stark truth, stalks
becoming sere and dry, flowers reaching early seed,
vegetables requiring emergency shelter to survive.
The flagstones become covered with creeping, patchy
thorns, the only true green that of the sprawling weeds.

They force their way through the minutest of cracks, but
I will continue to dream the winter dream, insanely hoping
for different results, hoping for the green of spring, only
to awaken to summer’s reality: the brutally shoving, grasping,
desert weeds, cracking man-made containers we hope to fill.

Tracy Plath

The Shape Surrounding

It was my best friend’s fifteenth birthday, her party held in the garage of her home. I stood in a dusty corner and watched the others, as was my wont, hoping I wouldn’t be noticed, observing as my solo soul required. Warmth bloomed on the side of my face and neck as I felt another gaze and glanced sideways, seeing a tall, dark haired, green eyed boy, watching me.

From across the crowded room. A tall, dark, handsome stranger. And he SAW me.

It was every love cliché imaginable, yet clichés have roots in truth. We would meet, both painfully shy, and attend two formal dances, awkwardly fumbling in the dark, two yearning innocents feeling a deeper connection than teenage words could describe. Shyness and misunderstanding would part our paths, and for twenty years I would endure a painfully mismatched marriage to a tall dark man who resembled my love in superficial looks alone. We walked our parallel paths, my one real love and I, our lives unknowingly shaped round the voids that encompassed one another, until our paths once again intersected. Free to speak, freed to love, we at last filled empty spaces our absences had created. A love begun before our births continues now, renewed, and will sustain us, no longer void, on and on to our next lives.

Tracy Plath

I’ve Been Downhearted, Babe

Blues moves my soul like no other sound,
a feeling so low, so soulfully crooned,
will lift me back up into the profound.

The laced canopy in the light of the moon
of soaring sycamore trees stitched the night
sky into mystery, and for a moment I found
peace until I gazed back down, fright
piercing my breastbone, watching the crowd,
and saw the back of my lover verge
into the swaying and moaning of Bluesfest 1989,
his lean, spare body skirting the lake’s edge,
morning glory vines crushed underfoot, as he guided
another girl by the hand to our jeep
and down into the blues I leaped.

Tracy Plath

Dynasty

The feather of a heron,
the wings of a crow
stirred my wandering feet
beside the riverbanks of my youth,
my namesake. I am John Heron*,
a child of the Crow people,
born the year after a great war, 1812.
I fell in  love with a white woman
and she with me, her pioneering spirit
a match to my own.
Together we traveled the dusty paths,
and explored wilder terrain.
The birth of a tiny daughter caused us to remain
rooted in a village, where illness took me away
to the next life, the next world to roam,
leaving my only girl to one day found
a wandering, roaming, winged dynasty.

Tracy Plath

*John Heron was my Native American ancestor. He fathered one child, my great great grandmother, and from her sprang my entire paternal family. He died of pneumonia at the age of 21 in 1834.