The Poetry Marathon

Hour 1: The Music is Enough

Hour 1: The Music is Enough

 

Riding the Coltrane highway through an almost midnight snow,

driving with you

into an inked-out sky laced

with snow, its blanketing white beauty

potentially fatal

when the head is turned.

 

The dim dashboard lights barely skim

your face in my peripheral vision.

Open closed, your eyes see

 

other times

other places

their faces

 

pounding the blacks and blues

out of their souls.

A sigh.

A low hum of appreciation punctuates the night

rhythmic interruptions of my struggle

to translate an aural narrative

played in a language I don’t speak.

 

Framed by silence between us,

the music is enough.

Poem 1 Influential Women

Personally, I know of no one personally. Still uncovering my own self. Still poking around corners, searching for the parts of me that went into hiding. Parts lingering in secret passageways, looking through windows at herself. The lost parts, that were spooked out of myself. The parts I am praying to return with each painful breath.

I imagine its hard to know of anyone personally. In a world where people lose parts of themselves. In a world where encounters with other humans leave you dismembered and discarded. When your own brain starts to rot, from all the toxins of life. You start learning the wrong stories. You start poisoning your own self. You begin detaching from the pain in your body. You do this, not recognizing all you truly know in life, is that you don’t know. All you truly have in life is yourself.

People only show you what they want you to know about them. All of us are just here, living around other infected people, being influenced by other lifers in this dimension, searching for lost soul parts until we die.

Life is full of influential women, but you are the most important one. You are the only one you have and the only person given to you to learn personally.

Bonsai

Bonsai

 

Old friends met.

An outing.

Lunch and bonsai.

 

Prepared azaleas for

a new way of life.

Scissors slashed,

raked off soil,

exposed roots

to fit new, smaller pots.

Need to get rooted

in new soil.

Trimmed back

leaves, branches

to the shape, scale of

full-sized bushes.

Need to adapt to

smaller surroundings.

 

We ate and talked,

more awkward now

in company of others.

Took our newly planted bonsai.

Returned home to

adapt to our new,

smaller lives.

To the Queen I’ll Never Meet

Within castle walls ,

You shelter the world

Within your peace and grace.

Ancient, yet your understanding

Ever young.

Who wouldn’t bow to a queen?

I’d love to bend the knees before you.

Do queens die?

• You, my queen, will reign in our hearts forever.

Hour 1

I still dream of an unfettered life

free

decades later I’m still imprisoned in an image

crafted

by others for profit.

Bare and vulnerable I posed

hoping

I could be seen as someone

human.

The ‘perfect’ woman is really a

man

But all I wanted was to be a

mother.

 

 

The Problem Is That– Hour 1

we all are aware

that

a cop would never

press his blue knee

down

on the white neck

of an Ivy-Leaguer

Cassandra

We have been told again and again
in all kinds of languages
modern, ancient
written, oral
rhyme, prose
urban, rural
scientific, plain English
lingua, tongue
spoken word, sign
cartoons, paintings
in times of heat, in times of cold
in times of draught, in times of floods
in times of fires, in times of melts
our ears unable to see
our eyes unable to hear
prophecy to our grasshopper play
is terrifying
is not, Rachel Carson

Poem 1 From Prompt #1 My Mother…My Influence and Sometimes Muse by Ingrid Exner

Today,

My Mother is

bent with age.

 

Calloused hands that

once held mine-

through Education, Illness and Time!

 

Memories swim through her

Eyes!

Talking, sharing and laughing,

we have swam miles-

Together!

 

Yet today, we

Wade!

through memories

Fearing Forgetfulness

of anything new.

My warrior sister, my mother-

My muse!

 

Today,

My  Mother is

Bent with

age

but fearlessly

facing tomorrow

in Strength!

 

By Ingrid Exner, 2020 Half Marathon

For Susan B Anthony (Hour 1)

For Susan B. Anthony

 

Petticoats fluttered, I suppose

on those endless rides across the prairie.

Your heart may have fluttered, too,

as you braced to speak out.

So much of that ride was uphill

through cold landscapes.

Still, the landscape softened;

hills flattened; fences dropped.

Your travels and speeches

left a permanent trail.

We follow your path today —

speaking out with fluttering hearts

on every uphill ride.

Michelle

 

 

Michelle

 

she didn’t know that

she would feel this way

woken woman

didn’t expect that

the white house

would be white washed

as if she wasn’t there

 

antiseptically wiped away

by white privilege

while a virus

survives

wipes

less than

deep rooted

resentment

breeding deep inside.

 

a heart frozen

in hate

can’t thaw

until the drive

to win at the cost

of someone else’s

loss

 

is buried deep

in a history that

doesn’t understand

we were born to learn

lessons that prism white

into a rainbow of colors

 

while Michelle bides

her time until we see

that black and white

blend into who we can be