The Poetry Marathon

While driving my daughter to school in the early morning hours of a freezing November day, in a grave tone of voice she quietly said to me “Mom, we need to talk.” I shot a look at her in the passenger side seat, and seeing her serious and frightened face, with a sinking feeling I knew what she was going to say. I mouthed the words to her “Are you pregnant?” and she slowly raised her index finger up and touched it to her nose. Though only seventeen when she gave birth, she would from the very beginning be an excellent mother to her baby boy, Leon. She enrolled in her high school’s online program so that she could graduate with her class and still parent her son, and in a high school work study internship for students interested in either nursing or teaching. She excelled in all while still caring for her growing little boy, born the 25th of July, a Leo birth sign for our little lion man, not only our Christmas in July gift, but by pure chance with a name that spelled backward the Christmas word “Noel.”

CD paced walking
is now digital streaming
hung just to scare crows

His other woman offers circuses;
I am his bread.
She will never nourish or sustain
as I do. Though she lures him
with her games, his hunger will bring him back.

Our children fall prey
to her charms as well,
her empty promises of entertainment
through long and lonely furtive nights
pull them from my arms.

He will do with her
what he cannot do with me,
shopping for perfect gifts for hours
with her feverish assistance,
needing just a single word to find them.

I will wait, for I am
far more sturdy than she.
My fragile rival will fall with the next
electrical storm, an EMP blast
will see her fade into the ether.

My flesh will survive
her dark and bloody bytes.
I, his first, am patient,
for I know her promised perfect 10
is a binary second to me.

Sue, my dear mother-in-law, was celebrating her 70th birthday
in the last lucid days before ALS would take her from us.
She asked that we come to her, travel from Texas to Massachusetts,
likely knowing the end was nigh.

Our grandson was not yet two, but would make the trip with us,
the only chance his great grandmother Sue and her own
mother-in-law, his great great grandmother, would ever have to see him.

Travel there was beautifully smooth and easy, our bitty grandson
a slumbering cherub in our arms. Once there, he nestled sweetly
in Sue’s hospital bed, seeming to sense her fragility, playing baby
hand games with her, each delighting in the other.

Memories were made, to be later cherished, and our time there came
to an end as we entered the plane that would take us home once again.
Our boy cherub from the trip out disappeared and all the long return
he was utterly inconsolable, a stiff, screaming, and keening banshee.

Sue would be gone two months later.

We’ve dreamed the garden dream for so long,
six infinite-feeling years in a desert town
have finally ended, and dreams can root and grow.

Connection to the earth began for me decades ago,
a broken child seeking an anchoring tether
and finding it in the minuscule but richly complex
backyard world of plants, earth, bugs, and birds.

Healing began there, and finally finished in adult gardens,
at peace with my hands in the earth and sun on my back.
Now more than ever, as disease and warfare push
stress and strife in our faces, I long to make things grow.

I will pass on that love and knowledge to my children,
secure in the thought at the end of my days
that they can feed themselves and generations to come.

They will gather the future fruits of the labors we begin today,
and feel my love for them, growing and alive, all over again.

* Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s quote: “This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden-so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.”

By Hand

Gazing out the kitchen window, my most strenuous
physical exertion these days is plunging my hands
into hot, soapy water, carefully washing each dish,
pan, and piece of silverware, no machine allowed here.

As my hands perform their practiced routine
I drift along the currents and eddies
of past, present, and future, timelessly suspended
and sampling like a banquet, spread for my mind to taste.

Memories of my children as babies, my husband and I
as high school teens, myself as a child of the 1970’s, scroll through
in technicolor, longing tingeing the corners of each memory,
to return and hug a lost loved one, see a favorite vanished place.

Present worries push through every now and then, plans, lists,
and needs demanding head space and time, but are soon
submerged beneath the warm water and waves of music,
my laptop softly playing as my hands do as they have done for forty years,
and I am at peace with the world once again.

Tracy Plath

“Mother, may I . . . ?”
I recall the childhood game, and I
am transported
in time and place to my first innocent
love, sticky taffy shared on the playground
with Scotty, curly haired boy,
a kid with attitude and spunk, later made a
robot by ADHD meds, struggling to awaken and recognize
a friend like me, another kid
with attitude, but whose parents’
love allowed for more freedom, less control
in growth and play. I
am reminded of him in my grandson, and
I will play the old game once more:
“Mother, may I . . . ?”

*First line of Tanith Lee’s book “The Silver Metal Lover,” repeated forward and backward both here in the first word of each line of this poem.

My ancestors hailed from harshness and sought new lands far and wide
with their wooden ships in which to spread their seed, for farms and for genetics.

The land I long for is that of my origins,
known only by legend.
In that place, whales spout in ice choked bays and fjords,
ice achieves a depth whose inner color rivals that of the piercing blue sky,
northern lights dance an impossible dream of pulsing colors
within a perpetual twilight,
hot springs of mineral laden water bathe bodies that ache with cold,
and a fire blazes within a great timbered lodge whose walls resound
with the fire songs, the sea songs of old.

I will see this place when my days have played themselves out to their end,
a valiant life the earned passage to my seat among ancestral Norse ranks.

Two shadow heartbeats
on a grey and white screen
thumped in synchrony with each other
and with my own heart,
a trifecta of burgeoning life
within me.

Sprouting growing limbs,
organs, fingers, and toes
from tiny tadpole bodies,
they danced and squirmed round each other,
my identical, beautiful girls.

Two shadow heartbeats
one day on that screen
de-synchronized, one gone.
Two girl bodies remained,
swayed in the reflected rhythm,
but one unformed soul had fled,
one living girl growing within me
one girl dead.

Weeks later I birthed them both,
identical still to the end,
one live child to rejoice in the light,
one child a shadow forever more.

*Use at least five of the following ten words in a single poem: strange, firefly, bottle, cottage, heat, mask, zoom, treeline, porridge, lethargy

Stranger Danger

Don’t pay the ferryman
in this fairytale
that strange one will carry
you to death.

A firefly in a bottle
may light up the wattle
of this odd cottage
but no heat from within will be spent.

Zoom in on the bears at the treeline
as they approach the cottage from afar:
don’t eat the porridge, or lethargy
will certainly lead to death.

A mask on a stranger
will not save you from danger,
hi-yo, silver coins for the ferryman
cannot avert tears of Lethe.