Inspiration from others – Elizabeth Oakley Weaver

Math Genius

If you think dogs can’t count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.

Phil Pastoret

Graffito

GRAFFITO

Three distinct letters, 
discrete as whispers
yet stark as sunrise,
stain this park’s 
concrete wall. 

S insinuates 
the dark entrance,
secret from those
passwordless,
but once in, one
snakes along this
sinuous passage

toward E, 
which sighs
like a wind-filled
cavern 
in the fold of a word
so bare 
it exposes the language of pores 
opening like stomata 
along nerve-laden skin,
of tongues probing  
tasting  moistening  unveiling
revealing the voracious 
pulse and press of pelvis  
belly  
even neck, bared 
for the thin membrane of skin,
primordial as sound rising 
from ancestral marrow
formed of molten rock and sky-filled sea

before X marks the space 
within and between.

Thank you to the editors of HOT FLASHES: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.

Fame

Fame puts you there where things are hollow.

John Lennon to David Bowie before Bowie’s mega-fame

Sweetness

Your heart is the size of an ocean;
Go find yourself in its hidden depths.
Find sweetness in your own heart,
then you may find the sweetness in every heart.

~ Rumi~

Neighbors

When a neighbor wrote this on the sidewalk in 2020, I felt it in grey…

yet, in 2023, I feel the optimism that my neighbor’s color choice conveys. I continue hoping “BETTER” for so many more, in so many more ways that anyone might have imagined three years ago.

Forgiveness

Longest Night

In many traditions, this long night marks the end of the solar year, the final day of increasing dark. Tomorrow our days will lengthen and a new year begins, not by calendar, but by the sun’s time.

Here’s to the cycles and the richness of dark, the silence of snow and opportunities to reflect, to sleep, and once more emerge into increasing light.

May this year bring peace, more love, more ease and safety for all. HAPPY SOLSTICE!

Dark in Light

DARK IN LIGHT


Wanted to show you the moon
but cruised off the wrong ramp
and wound up in a war zone
where there is no curfew:
men standing solo in the middle of the street
or huddled, talking beneath burned-out lamps;
				
wanted to show you the soccer moon
but drove down darkened roads with bars 
enclosing windows and doors,
barbed wire spiraling a hardware 
store and nursery—planks and daisies 
out of reach;
	
wanted you to count the seas
across that haloed orb
but drove alone 
through neighborhoods as treeless
as that dog-song moon;
beat-up cars driven 
beyond unmarked borders
pulled over by uniforms 
with clubs and guns,				
jagged tension cutting concrete air;
				
I want to know who 
declared this war of Americans
against Americans:
children peer from sheeted windows,
women hide behind hollow doors,
a man looks up from an empty street, 
each of us equal 
distance from the sun’s reflective sphere.

Thank you to the editor of Something Like Homesickness for first publishing this poem.

Now

Whatever you need to do, do it now. The conditions will always be impossible.

Doris Lessing

Conscious

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

C.G. Jung