Let’s hear it for Goats!: preventing fires and saving lives.
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Soaked
SOAKED
I want you in my home to know you’re not alone
in those long-shadowed halls paced by perpetually
lost—dementia scouring their last stains of memory
more than safe,
I want you to feel safe
yet I’m drowning in this
deep dank bog of lung
rain sluices from leaves beneath a starless sky
as distant shouts urge me to find my way back
yet I am beyond lost having unwrapped and dropped
their safety rope from my waist so I could reach you
all my cells replicated yours when you were
my sole cord to life—for that I worshipped you
till the God, Hormones, ascended
as I stumble over elephantine roots,
machete through plants so large dinosaurs
must still exist on this swampy earth,
my lungs match each step's suck of mud,
every breath a drowning, yet I won’t
release this taut line between us mottled
with white ash and blood dark wine nor
understand how your Emmental brain
won't let you walk or know where you are
in time, yet provides lucid wit and end-
less memory for the inconsequential
years now since I severed and flung
our rope in your flames yet you remain
tangled as worry and seared to my palm
when I reach for you in wake or in dream
unable to rest or breathe for want of you
Thank you to the editors of Melancholy Hyperbole for first publishing this poem in an earlier version.
Choose
Between stimulus and response
there is a space.
In that space is our power to
choose our response.
In our response lies our
growth and our freedom.
~Viktor E. Frankl
Vida
They threw us away
but forgot
we are seeds.
~Clarissa Pinkola Estes' friend~
Belong
If we have
no peace
it is because
we have
forgotten
that we
belong
to each other.
Mother Teresa
Star Spangled
“The Star Spangled Banner”
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~
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!
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 