Tag: Elizabeth Weaver
poetry, writing, novel, yoga, restorative yoga, improv, near death, asthma, hope, social imbalance
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.
Conscious
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Please Vote
A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.
James Freeman Clarke
Voting Rocks!
Washington
If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Harry S. Truman
Please VOTE
Día de Muertos
painting & photo by Elizabeth
THE CHOIR I walk and I rest while the eyes of my dead look through my own, inaudible hosannas greet the panorama charged serene and almost ultraviolet with so much witness. Holy the sea, the palpitating membrane divided into dazzling fields and whaledark by the sun. Holy the dark, pierced by late revelers and dawnbirds, the garbage truck suspended in shy light, the oystershell and crushed clam of the driveway, the dahlia pressed like lotus on its open palm. Holy the handmade and created side by side, the sapphire of their marriage, green flies and shit in condums in the crabshell rinsed by the buzzing tide. Holy the light-- the poison ivy livid in its glare, the gypsy moths festooning the pine barrens, the mating monarch butterflies between the chic boutiques. The mermaids handprint on the artificial reef. Holy the we, cast in the mermaid's image, smooth crotch of mystery and scale, inscrutable until divulged by god and sex into its gender, every touch a secret intercourse with angels as we walk proffered and taken. Their great wings batter the air, our retinas bloom silver spots like beacons. Better than silicone or graphite flesh absorbs the shock of the divine crash-landing. I roll my eyes back, skylights brushed by plumage of detail, the unrehearsed and minuscule, the anecdotal midnight themes of the carbon sea where we are joined: zinnia, tomato, garlic wreaths crowning the compost heap. Olga Broumas
Lil’ Lamb
Three-week-old lamb always flanked by Mom and aunties.
Explosion
EXPLOSION
Days after the United Nations coalesced, she slivered out in almost as many pieces as she had cells. There were cells that had surrounded the embryo created before her lungs had forced its expulsion, cells that hurled with such force one could not imagine how hard they’d tried to make marriage work yet a lifetime isn’t just love and loyalty but also kismet, and sometimes everything that can go wrong lasts beyond endurance and without right. Some cells radiated forth like the kaleidoscope that made her laugh as a girl while others were sucked into dark stars, worm holes, the Horsehead Nebula…she’d always wanted to be a horse. Only two of her cells joined like team cyclists breaking wind for the other so they could reach the crescent’s pointy tip where they stayed to play with shadow and light along the impish moon thus fulfilling what she’d have chosen if not embodied.
Thank you to the editors of Doorknobs and BodyPaint for first publishing “Explosion.”
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 