One of the most important discriminations we can make
… is the difference between things that beckon to us
and things that call from our souls.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Soul
Goats!
Let’s hear it for the Goats!: preventing fires and saving lives.
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~
Magic!
My favorite photographs have been unexpected: a double image, something I hadn’t seen when I took the shot, or a photo I didn’t intentionally take yet captured what I hadn’t seen.
The first shot is what I could see: a sun-drenched hiking trail with rocks and almost no vegetation. The washed out flower at the center of this shot is the same flower in the next, though it was hidden in plain sight till a fluke of light and perspective revealed its magnificence.
My only edit to the first photo was to reduce the light and slightly increase the definition so the vegetation in the center was visible. The second shot resulted a split second later due to an inadvertent twitch of my finger. I gasped when I saw the second photo, which is unedited, while the third photo is my edit of the second. For me the second shot is what makes photography magic!
Belong
If we have
no peace
it is because
we have
forgotten
that we
belong
to each other.
Mother Teresa
Fairyland Smile
Star Spangled
“The Star Spangled Banner”
If Bird
IF BIRD You would be my loon calling long past light, my mourning dove, my sweetest finch flashing sun from black as night. If my bird you were I’d feed you nectar from my palm and plant thick trees for you to rest and nest until I could transform my arms and hands to feathered limbs— our hearts remade as song.
Thank you to the editors of The Tishman Review for first publishing this poem.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 