The Poetry Marathon

Sometimes the unfortunates
have the finest views,
clouds rolling in a distant valley,
a hawk swooping down on green meadow,
the rich man gazing out on rooftops
and opportunities.

It isn’t nature who decides
who lives in the wild,
who lives in the penthouse.

Chance and weather conditions
may choose the tornados path,
but humans build their homes
on fault lines.

In Afghanistan, a 6.1 earthquake.
Mudslides bury the living and the dead.

In Oklahomaa, a 5.8 temblor
tumbled chimneys,
loosened ceiling tiles in classrooms,
shut down businesses for repairs,
cracked my tile floor.
No one died.

It wasn’t nature, but circumstances.

Perhaps it’s your lot in life
to live in your own space, among old trees.
Maybe you’re in a refugee camp,
dependent of the kindness of strangers
and the whims of an autocrat.

Nature is ruthless,
but she can’t take all the blame
for human choices,
for economic circumstances,
for the damage the powerful can wreak
on the powerless.

We don’t know what we don’t know,
and in the scope of the universe
or universes,
we don’t know much.

That doesn’t stop self-proclaimed experts
from shoveling shit,
rejecting truths,
from filling our heads with bad info
and doubts, filling some heads
with assurances that aren’t assurable.

When you have questions, they shut you down.
You’re too young to know.
You don’t need to know.

Only God knows, someone I once knew would say,
then proceed to tell me what God knows.

Unproven, just a theory, my cousin says.
He rejects natural selection, but he believes
in the politics of survival of the fittest,
and that he knows what I don’t.

I’m sure he does. No one knows everything.
We all know something. If only
we could know what we don’t know. If only
we were sure of what we do.

Finally, beware the person who professes to know
what’s best for you. Sometimes
we don’t even know ourselves. Sometimes
we can’t even recognize truth
when we’re staring her in the face.

Poets can’t help but insert their experiences, the fears, their beliefs into their works.

I’m surprised at how easily I slipped into poetry mode a day after the lives of too many women in American have been changed for the worse, a day when it was made official that we aren’t in charge of our own bodies, our decisions, our lives. What will we lose next?

And yet, here I am, able to take a prompt, think on it, and write. Today, poetry will be my meditation.

about water? I didn’t learn
to float until I was fifty,
in a water aerobics class,
mostly older women. The young instructor
called us his water buffalo
and it got back to us.
We adopted the name.

Couldn’t swim, but that didn’t stop me
from going over the side of a boat
off Buck Island, snorkeling
along the reef. Still amazed
at the school of bright blue fish
who swam as one sinuous body.

Couldn’t swim, but that didn’t stop me
reveling in hot water,
my morning shower, the space
where a woman can think,
sculpt lines of poetry,
play out scenes in a novel,
solve the world’s problems.

What do I know about water?
We can’t live without it.
We don’t eat without it.
Forests and prairies burn
when there is too little rain.
Children and old folks starve
along with the livestock
during a drought.

Water creates canyons
over eons as it wears away stone,
and makes my morning coffee,
water and bitter beans,
happen.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been doing the Half Marathon, but I look forward to it every year. In addition to poetry, I write essays for The Oklahoma Observer and magazine pieces for Okie Charmed, a women’s magazine. I’m good with deadlines. Without them, I struggle to keep the focus on my writing.

I have a garden, chickens, dogs, cats, and a man. I teach Tai Chi two days a week and host a monthly poetry reading. I have a need to keep moving, but The Poetry Marathon is a day to focus, to set everything else aside.

My grandson makes the preacher nervous
asking way too many questions.
The preacher makes me nervous.
Why would Joe say he wants
to go to heaven
to see his dad?
Who planted
that seed?
Heart

breaking I say, if there’s a heaven,
your dad will wait and watch you grow.
Even though he didn’t, he
wants you to grow old. You’re
his eternity,
what’s left of him
here on
earth.

This piece is unfinished. I believe this topic would work best as a Zuihitsu. I need to do some research about the form before I revise.

In the new cloud park,
the forest ranger pulls on his gumboots
and steps out into mist.
He’s accustomed to trees,
and he doesn’t know quite what to do
with the clouds in his care.

Yes, he lied to the park superintendent,
told him he had experience in skyscaping.
The superintendent believed
because he wanted to.

Skyscapers are in demand, now,
in this wet, rainy climate.
Forest rangers, not so much
with so many of the forests gone.

He wasn’t sure he could take one more season
in the fire belt. He’ll learn how
to sculpt the clouds so people on the ground,
and in penthouse apartments can look up

See something besides the constant rain.
It’s either too much or not enough,
floods or fire. Clouds
are a tourist attraction now,

attracting visitors from the dry zones.
Some enterprising real estate agents
have been renting out balconies
in the clouds.

With a shovel, he beats the mist into a froth,
and with a custom made spatula, forms the high cloud,
spreads it like fondant. Briefly, the sun breaks through
making the frosting of his cloud cake pink

It’s a quick show, before the bottom falls out
and the rain begins again.
Good work, the superintendent says.
You might as well go home now. It will rain

until morning. The hours are erratic,
but at least it’s a job. He changes into street waders,
slides down the tube, and goes home.
The smell of fresh sourdough greets him at the door.

While he eats his bread and soup, he dreams of designs.
It can’t be cake every day. He thinks of an old movie,
wonders how hard it would be to make a cloud Godzilla.
Would the folks below even know who it was?

The rain gauge says almost two inches of rain.
In the brief respite,
the dogs and I go out.
My bones, and the weather app, tell me
it isn’t over yet.

My job is to feed the chickens
and chase a packrat out of the coop.
The dogs patrol the fence
and keep an eye on me.

While I’m out
I pick a handful of green beans
and one ripening tomato.
I’ll cook tomorrow,
and mop up the muddy paw prints in the entry.

Today, I’m writing,
eating out of the fridge,
and letting the dogs run.

It is good to obey all the rules when you’re young, so you’ll have the strength to break them when you’re old.
–Mark Twain

Why wait until you’re old?
You kids know a bad rule
when you confront it.

Now, don’t break rules
just for the sake of breaking them;
have a damned good reason.

If a rule is bad,
it needs to be broken.
That takes strength,
and courage,
no matter your age.

Regarding writing rules,
you need to know them
before you break them.

Don’t break writing rules
because you don’t know any better,
break them to make your writing better.

There are some things that stick with you.
some combination of emotion and the senses
that keep a memory alive,
like the morning I awoke to the Monarchs,
mid migration, all the limbs on the trees alive
with butterflies flittering like leaves in a breeze.

I remember carrying my son, not yet a day old,
wrapped in a blue crocheted blanket
and my arms. How careful I was
as I got into the back of the car
to take him home. And how hungry.
I hadn’t eaten for thirty-six hours, at least.
We stopped for hamburgers.

Three years later, in a hospital this time,
a nurse brought my daughter to me.
She was as light as as a hollow-boned bird.

I was embroidering a gown for her.
As I set the embroidery aside to take baby into my arms,
the nurse exclaimed, “You love her!”
as if that were in question.

I remember the first time I made love
to the man I’ve slept with for the past 38 years.
Maybe I knew then that he was forever.

And it only takes a tiny jog to the memory
For me to see the balloons
rising from the valley floor
that morning in the Sandias.