The Poetry Marathon

Train of Life – Hour 7

Let me tell you a tale
Of the Train that represents Life

This train guides us through our life
From the baby’s breath of bravery
Over to our subborn friends on the road
And finally our grandma’s death

This train will always be by our side
It will hold close our memories
And keep track of our enemies
And it will cherish our trasures in life

This train will end our life
It decides when it arrives at the last stop
It decides how it will arrive there
It decides on who gets out of the train with us

Haunted

Sometimes I don’t understand

Why I didn’t realize as a child

That the house I lived in was haunted

The windows, always the windows

I was terrified of them

Something was watching me in the woods

I made my parents buy me thick curtains that were never opened

Nightmares of faces scared me in the night

The woods I had grown up in,

That had raised me

Felt dangerous

And I had no idea why

Creaks in the night

Windows, so many windows

Burning at night with something unholy

When I was a toddler, so I am told

I woke screaming of demons in the air

Attacking me, swooping down to me

When I was a pre-teen, my fear of the windows drove me to my sisters floor where I slept for half a year

Something was lurking in the dark

Step outside children

And feel the cold creeping up on you

You are being watched, always watched

Your mother feels it too

This land is cursed

Only this house, built by your father, protects you

Come out to play children

We are waiting

 

 

 

Sunrise

From the shelf I bring down the canteen,

instant coffee, measure out a large dose

and catch the kettle just before it whistles.

There is a hush outside, moonbeams

still trickling though the fog and heavy branches

of the fir trees. The cabin is wood and I

are miles from the closest concrete structure,

a lonely hike through the trees yesterday.

I head down the dock and pour out

my first cup of the pre-morning, waiting

as I have all night to wash the first streaks

of sun lighten the darkness, cleansing

your damned soul from my flesh, my eyes

bloodshot today from my vigil, not tears.

Hour 10. (2019)

By the dock stood he

Watching the trajectory of a solitary moonbeam

Cutting through the fog

Like the sound of a chopped fir cutting through

The silence of the forest

Yet the fir has kissed the ground and hushed the forest once more

And the moonbeam now dances on the waves of the Pacific.

The Ingredients of Us (Hour 9)

The ingredients of us are never
exact measurements. Just thrown together at will
and upon necessity, combined with hopeful efforts
that something worthy will become of our mixing.

A dash of words chosen for us, to define us,
to spend our young adult lives trying to unshackle
from whom we had grown into.
A splash of distant mother, a shake of detached father,
a pinch of childhood ending too soon.
A handful of home that felt unsafe,
and a generous amount of life’s imperfections.

The ingredients of us are the most delicious parts,
each tantalizing on its own, spoon-licking trauma
nurtured by an unrelenting hand. Swirled together
in an heirloom bowl, passed down from one generation
to the next, wherein each was created the meal of their own making,
every part a distinguishing feature of a repeating recipe.

And in our time we took the bowl, added to it
the secrets of our families’ history,
mixed equal portions of good and bad
until our story became a creation of both.
And now we eat this bread we inherited.
This bread we contributed to, changed slightly,
and will pass on to our children,
in the same mixing bowl, still holding all the cracks of the past,
and some new, as evidence of our use.

Soft

Does it make me soft
That I feel kinship with the milkmaid
From times long gone?

Does it make me weak
That I long to make a home 
Warm and comfortable and safe?

Does it make me teutonic
To desire a flourishing garden
And a family well fed?

Why should I shy away
From the traditional femininity
In ways that are not stifling?

Why can I not be soft?

Together

We will be old and wrinkly,
with liver spots and creaky joints.
Matching silver hair on our heads.
We can sit on the porch, rocking.

Always, Everywhere

I stray from thought to thought
before birdsong fills the humid air
in the blue dawn of summer
as the feeling of you slips away.

I don’t know where you are, where
you were, or even if you were. Are
you a vague memory, or have I
dreamed you into existence?

I saw us heart to heart
felt us resonate in a stillness
of quiet presence, neither
here nor there, then or now
but for always, everywhere.

Coffee -Poem 10

There is a moonbeam

in my coffee cup

I sip it gently

A hush,

a fog

washes over me

I am no longer concrete

I am no longer damned

I have jumped from my shelf

I am more like a tall, strong fir

Reaching to the sky.

No canteens of water will do

No juice, no flaming alcohol drinks

No carbonated sugar in a tall bottle

Just coffee

Swirling misty coffee

Bracing me for whatever winds

Blow me away from my safe dock

Into the stormy sea

 

 

19~9 The Yearling

She came to me

In the quiet of the night

The tiniest shrieking

That gave me a fright

 

Took forever to find her

Abandoned for sure

I fixed up her tummy

And searched for a cure

 

But something was wrong

A defect in her song

Though she tried best she could

The far future was no good

 

Then one night in the rain

I heard her in pain

And I knew how I’d cry

As I took her to die