The Poetry Marathon

My son-in-law died of Covid.
I wrote his obituary.
I sent flowers.
I didn’t go to his funeral.
I knew it wasn’t normal.

The governor was at Jerad’s funeral,
without a mask.
He shook hands with my grandsons
who had tested positive for the virus.
Not to worry!
He was the first US governor to get the virus.

He refused to mandate masks in Oklahoma.
After all, he survived.
This brand of governor
has become too normal.

My son came from Virginia
to help his sister navigate
the roiling waters of widowhood.
He brought his laptops and his work.
Working from anywhere has become normal.

We visited, son, daughter, grandsons
on one side of the dining room window,
parents on the other side,
talking on our phones.
Not normal, but we were where we needed to be.

The first thing I did two weeks after my second vaccine dose
was hug my daughter and my grandsons.
My son will be here next month for a family memorial.
I’ll hug him, too.
The governor won’t be there.

My friend died two weeks ago,
the latest in a string of relatives and friends.
She didn’t believe in vaccines.
Her family says, We think
she died of a cardiac event.

I worry for the undertakers,
for family members,
and for the churchgoing faithful
who never miss a funeral.
Worry is normal.

As has become custom,
I sent flowers
and didn’t go to the funeral.

Normal is a fluid state.

Every day, I try to take at least ten thousand steps.

Every hour, when I’m writing, I get up from my hard chair,
measure time with the clock
and the laps through the great room, down the long hall,
and back again.
The scientist in me measures everything, including how many laps
in an hour.

In the before time, there was a huge treadmill
filling the space between the sitting area and kitchen.
It’s rumbling noise bothered the dogs and
made it hard for the man to listen to the television
as I let the machine do the counting, miles,
miles per hour, the daily hour
while I read from the tablet in front of me.

I read a lot of books that way, carving out time
for two tools in my self-care kit.

Then, when everything shut down,
when I had more time than ever,
the treadmill quit.
Just like that.
I ordered the mother board from Amazon,
but we never got it set just right.

We hauled the treadmill to the thrift store,
set it on the covered porch,
and drove away.

The house felt bigger.
There was space to move,
and I worked out my route.

I had less time to read,
but more time to think.

Today, in the sixth hour of writing,
I measure my laps
before sitting to write again,
and guess what the prompt is,
what I’m to write about.
Tell me without saying the word.
Your turn.

My garden is a time capsule,
it’s contents a catalog
of my successes and my mistakes.

In the corners and along the edges,
irises, cannas, and lilies bloom
when it’s their time.
My small white rose bush,
a gift from a secret pal,
blossoms all summer long.

It’s a history of my education–
of hyssop that pleases the bees,
the weeds I leave in spring
because the butterflies like them,
the goji berry plant, confined to a pot,
the blackberry bed,
the run amok strawberries,
and the things I shouldn’t have planted,
wouldn’t have planted, if only I’d known
what great bullies they were,
pushing out all the other plants,
staking their claim
with some type of herbal manifest destiny.

Each year I work to keep lemon balm
and tuberous-rooted sunflowers in check,
to make sure the annual flowers
and vegetables have room to grow.

Each year, I’m surprised again
when the time capsule opens up
and reminds me again
how much I have to learn,
and how nature always wins.

When we left home,
left our preacher fathers
for the parochial school my mother,
also a preacher, had attended,
we knew nothing.

That’s not true. We knew a lot.
We could quote the Bible.
We knew the words and melodies
to dozens of hymns and choruses
and spoke Spanish well enough
to spend a summer on the mission field,
you in Costa Rica,
me in Mexico.
We knew how to read people.

We found each other in the hall
of our first dorm. For all our similarities,
we were different.
I was a scholar.
You were a cheerleader.
I rushed headlong into trouble.
You sauntered into the mess.

What we learned that year
had little to do with algebra, history, or religion.

I learned to avoid the preacher’s sons
and the preachers to be,
the former sent here by their parents,
the later by hopes or a calling.
The local boys, just back from Viet Nam,
were safer and more fun,
despite their bags of weed and white crosses.

The school didn’t appreciate our off-campus education.
The letter I received at the end of semester
asked me to choose another fine Christian institution to attend.

I’m not sure what they determined were our sins?
We went to our classes.
We turned in our homework.
We were in the dorm by curfew.

Maybe it was the questions we asked.
Maybe it was our brashness.
Maybe it was the basketball player I’d started dating.

Her daddy blamed me.
My daddy blamed her,
and kept the letter secret from my mother.

You and I kept in touch.
We married.
Had children.
Married again.
Learned what couldn’t be taught in church.

You never lost your faith.
I gained a new one, in nature, in critical thinking, in love and kindness.

Then the pandemic. My son told me you were sick,
a blood clot. Not a stroke.

I wrote to you, and you called.
After all those years, and it was just like always.

Not Covid, you said,
but you didn’t know what had caused the clot.

Jenny lost her husband to Covid, I said.
My daughter, a widow, the daughter
you helped me raise when I left my first husband.

Two old ladies.
Decades of history, of education, formal and informal.
All those years, some happy, some tragic.

And somehow, we had survived.*

*from The Great Trouble by Deborah Hopkinson

It’s a sort of truth itself that
repeating something often enough
gives it the illusion of truth.

Advertisers know this.

How many of us can go a day
without applying deodorant
or moisturizer?
Who told you the smell of sweat
was something to be feared?
Or wrinkles?

Advertising is mostly harmless,
but not so much preachers and politicians.

Who made you believe that you were going to hell
just for being you?

Who told you democracy had failed, when, in fact,
it worked as it was intended?

So you wasted money on those vitamins
that were supposed to make your hair shiny,
but didn’t.

Advertising is mostly harmless,
but not so much preachers and politicians.

Who told families that the polio vaccine
was a plot by western countries
to sterilize their young men?

How many children will suffer
for that lie?
How many healthcare workers have to die?

Who tells you that this candidate or that
is a socialist
without telling you what socialism really is?

Hey, if your government doesn’t even tax corporations,
much less seize control of them for the people,
yeah, even that for the people shit is a lie,
this isn’t a socialist country.

Who makes you fear refugees
who are only looking for a safe place
to live and love and work?

You may have bought that latest kitchen gadget
that takes up space on the counter.
Advertising may make you waste dollars,

but preachers and politicians,
both the true believers and the liars,
will use their words to make you believe
that bondage is freedom,
that your neighbor is your enemy,
that earth doesn’t belong to us all,

and their words, repeated often enough,
can cost you your freedom or your life.

Something moves just outside my field of vision,
and the ghost of a shadow flits by me.
I don’t even believe in ghosts.

There’s that stump on our dirt road.
Every time I approach the hill,
I have to remind myself
it isn’t an animal perched there,
ready to run in front of me.

Clouds come alive. Dragons,
pale ocean liners,
the faces of ancient gods.

In the fan of leaves
I see a bird,
in the rustle of grass
a rabbit.

I can’t blame poor eyesight,
but my imagination
that a flitter, a flutter,
a limb, a leaf,
a cloud shadow,
almost anything at all
can set in motion.

Coffee! Those brewed beans
don’t change things; they charge us, and
we make change happen.

Words are my medium.
And melodies.

Color and composition
are yours.

We’ve always been two sides
of a canvas,
a piece of paper,
Two voices in a song,
harmonizing,

but after all these years,
I’ve learned to see–
the way the colors fit,
the way a scene leads the eye.

When the light shifts a certain way, I’ll call,
Come, see this!
And you come
bringing a camera. You’ve learned to trust
my eyes.

You are curious about words,
rolling them in your mouth,
fitting them into your understanding.

And you’re my best editor.
No one but you knows that word, you’ll say.
Choose one everyone can understand.
You are almost always right.

How lucky we both are
to have found our other half.

Like everyone
I am many things–
mother,
grandmother,
wife to a working artist,
musician,
gardener,
teacher,
writer and poet,
but when people ask.
as they sometimes do,
What do you do,
I tell them
I’m a poet.

“I always knew I’d be preaching to the choir.”
John Lithgow

Firstborn daughter
of two preachers,
I was groomed to follow
the family tradition.

I sang on stage when I was three.
By four, I was picking out songs
on mama’s piano.
If only they hadn’t taught me
to be a critical thinker,
it might have happened,
I might have been an evangelist
like Mom and her sister, Bonnie.

I might have been a pastor,
like Dad.

Comfortable on stage,
a mighty voice,
lover of words,
but some of those stories
just didn’t make sense.

I’d ask questions,
and I wasn’t always comfortable with the answers.
I preferred logic to magic,
believed faith required proof.

I knew I was a disappointment,
the discordant voice in the family choir.

Even so, I think I followed their footsteps,
ministering
to students instead of parishioners,
preaching
the importance of thinking for oneself,

I want people to find heaven on earth,
to be accepted for who they are.

Kindness and love are holy enough for me.