snowcoveredmuse2 Poetry (4)

Here, On the other side of the page
where lost days go,
where lost poems go,
where forgotten dreams
are breaking up like morning fog.

Go.....
Go.....
Go.....

I am preparing myself for death.

I am teaching myself emptiness;
the gambler's hunger for love,
the nun's hunger for God,
the child's hunger for chocolate
in the hours of darkness.

I am teaching myself love;
the lean love of marble kissed away by rain,
the cold kisses of snow crystals on granite grave markers,
the soul kisses of snow as it melts in the spring.

Here, on the other side of the page
I lie making a snow angel with the arcs of my arms.
I lie like a fallen skier who never wants to get up.
I lie with my poles, my pens flung around me too far
in the snow to reach.

The snow seeps into the hollow of my bones
& the calcium white of the page deposits me
in like a fossil.

I am fixed in my longing for speech,
I am buried in the snowbank of my poems,
I am here, where you find me........

Dead-

SAS

For Daniel

"Why do you
stripes
in you forehead,
Mommy?
Are you
old?"

Not old
But not so
young
that I cannot
see
the world contracting
upon itself
& the circle
closing at the end.

As the furrows
in my brow
deepen,
I can see
myself
sinking back
into that childhood
street
I walked along
with my grandfather,
thinking he was old
at sixty-three
since I was four
to my forty.

Forty years
to take
the road out,
Will another forty
take me
back?

Back to the street
I grew up on,
back to
my mother's breast,
back to the second
world war
of a second
child,
back
to the cradle
endlessly
rocking?

I am young
as you are,
Daniel-
yet with stripes
in my brow;
I earn my youth
as you must earn
your age.

These stripes
are decorations
for my valor-
forty years
of marching
to a war
I could not declare,
nor locate,
yet have somehow won.

Now,
I begin
to unwin,
unravelling
the sleeves
of care
that have kept
me scared,
as I pranced
over the world,
seemingly fearless,
working
without a net,
knowing
if I fell
it would
only be
into that same
childhood street,
where I dreaded
to tread
on the lines-
not knowing
the lines
would someday
tread
on me.

Daniel,
when you are forty,
read this poem
& tell me:
have we won
or lost
the war?

~Mom

Poet to Poet
Sleep evades/
So many questions/
So few answers/

The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail. --Walt Whitman

Dearest Poet,
Something out of nothing.
Nothing so wondrous as the poet's making--
requiring so little in the way of raw materials--
and yet so much (dreams, memories, passion).

Do we do it out of love for
that phallic symbol, the pencil?
Is the pencil like a lover's magic wand--
beloved for the enchantment it
creates out of our own substance?

Or is it the simplicity of the tool?
The same tool that makes
children's drawings, telephone doodles,
lists of figures can also make worlds!

The ordinariness of the miracle.
It reminds us that creation
is both commonplace and divine.

~
(pause)

Giving a gift that cannot
but be given away--
a song, a poem, love,
breast-milk to a baby--
enriches the giver above all.

The circle is completed.
The gift comes back.
The daily practice of an
art enriches no one so fully
as it does the practitioner.
It is a thank you to God
for the gift of consciousness.

Out of that,
I have written this.
Out of emptiness
comes fullness.
Out of hunger
comes nourishment.
Out of unrequited
love come songs.

~
The poet, writing,
always spins
a web to join
her emptiness
with the fullness of
remembered love.

Remembered love
from childhood,
remembered love
never requited,
remembered love
perhaps only imagined.

~
Nobody can tell you
how to make the poem.
You must earn it word by word.
Nobody can give it to
you but yourself.
You cannot buy talent,
nor can you extinguish
talent by selling it.

But you can confuse
the bearer of it,
making him or her think
that mortality is not
the common condition.

We pass. Our breath
stains some pages.
We pass the pages
on as proof that we were here.

(pause)

The poem is a self-feeding,
a self-nourishment, a self-love.

To call it "therapy" is to diminish it.
What is the difference
between therapy and self-love?

~
All the difference in the world.

I must close, poet
Write soon!

SAS

A Promise


All that is true is found in nature
hence,
we learn from observation,
contemplation, and trust.

Behold the sapling,
once rich in color,
vibrant,
now grayed and dying.

Yet we know upon the seasons morrow,
brilliance again reborn,
the sapling, now stable oak,
strength against the storms ahead.

And the storms themselves,
initiating fear into one's soul,
charged with the very essence,
of the creation of life.

And dawn does rise
offering the lingering scent,
reminders of a storm
quietly fading from memory.

Dare you doubt
that when time has
swept the seasons course
that spring birds will sing in garden anew?

We are but nature's gift,
and if not my bed you warm this night,
hold tears for sorrows that are true,
for it is but a season that again I will return to you

~SAS