Belated Words

Write On!

Tag: poetry

  • Haiku….Relief

    Syrupy air rinsed clean,

    squeezed out tight and huge to dry

    in a gentler sun.

  • Grand Kids

    So sweet, the summer scent of grasses

    enveloping, floating them with ease

    across the yard, never touching ground,

    it seems, tumbling, cart-wheeling,

    timorous hand stands, “Watch me! Watch me!”

    Green stained feet squeaking on cool wood floors.

    Toes striving, pinching for purchase

    on chairs and thighs, climbing with moist aroma,

    lap squirming, so willfully loving.

    Flesh of my flesh of my flesh;

    joyous as salvation, and just as fleeting.

  • Cooking collards with Prometheus

     

    20241120_110129 

    First, a rinse under a gentle stream,

    veins down to earth cascades flow,

    cold water sweeping clinging grit

    rolling glints over savory emerald-ness

    of Gaia, like amoeba, feasting as they go.

    If prepared whole, some leaves would drape

    over both hands, an offering of perfection,

    but, as we are, pretenders to the thrones,

    we claim all honor of discovery and prep;

    we must tear, chop and season to our taste;

    salt, pepper, onion, pork, even brown sugar

    Are we attempting ambrosia?

     Collards, food of a more caring god?

    Perhaps, Prometheus presented this gift

    to us along with his glowing coals

    since we, had been denied ambrosia

    and fire’s warmth for no other reason than….

    I do not know why we were denied;

    merely created and left in want.

    I do know, sadly, that few of us have suffered

    as Prometheus, to love and care for mankind.

  • cognition tests…

    During the first break in the tests, you cried;

    frustration twisted your face tight as pain.

    Tears could not blur fright from your seeking eyes

    as you pled, silently, for solace which

    I tried to exude by words, touch, even

    by pure will.  “There’s no right or wrong answers,”

    I smiled, “the test will help to understand

    why you forget….”

                                  and look at me without

                                  comprehension as if I were a stain

                                  or quadratic equation on a board,

                                  and obsessively relive your childhood,

                                  and stumbling, you fall against the world.

                                  

    You are the locus, the center of spin…

     your affliction makes you so….I know that

    but try to think this way, it’s more soothing:

    take a line….horizontal is calming….

    and on that line, you are a data point,

    a point enclosed and held in the safety

    of a cluster of points, immersed and bathed

    in a like community, and not left

    sitting alone, an outlier astray;

    a unique Me trembling in white space.

  • I’ll mow the yard…

     

    I just fell off the page;

    for hours it seems I slid

    and at the edge my hands,

    cupped in ells, failed to grasp,

    and so, until I crash,

    I’ll pretend I’ve more important things to do.

  • I hate politics

     

    They ask for money daily now;

    horrid how principles rain ruin,

    hinder purpose, drain the coffers.

     

    I give one more quick donation;

    ten dollars, freely with sadness

    …..and hope.  We have a little left

    this month, but the donut hole looms,

    a snare that could snap both bone and will.

  • Dread

    Always the palpable dread turning behind

    my smile or frown; I’m the victim in the

    horror film that feels the sentient house’s

    aura on approach, the foreboding, the angst.

    Behind the pulled shade she waits to inform,

    throwing looks, crying distrust of even me,

    her tenaculum snared offspring.  I come to do

    her bidding grudgingly; a calloused hearted son.

    I’ve never learned: I attempt to reason, to plea,

    but logic is dead in her house, killed by disease

    which mints lies and villains as readily

    as harsh light cast shadows onto a wall.

    She’s not the one needing help she warns,

    but the others and, yes, me too, if I think so!

    So absolute in her anger…I wish it were true;

    this helplessness precludes affection.

  • My Fortieth Year…3:47 A.M.

    There were footsteps outside my door last night;

    loose gravel crunched, there was a catch in a gait.

    Something stood squinting in the darkness

    checking a number or matching a date.

    My heart ran rampant, throbbing, pumping dread;

    an emptying slash…..now a cavernous hollow.

    Opened now……anti-being knows my smell;

    when will it beckon for me to follow?

    I was actually 40 before I seriously considered and accepted the concept of mortality.  I awoke in the middle of the night with the most horrid feeling which haunted me for days.  This poem was an effort many, many years  ago to put words to it.  This feeling initiated the clichéd “mid-life crisis” which I quickly and completely recovered from…I’m now content, accepting and at ease.

  • scars

    Daylight, unforgiving and true,

    caught my hands at ease, flat,

    unflatteringly flat, upon my knees.

    Loosely applied over blue-veined

    rivers and tendon ridges, a pliant

    skin reveals a history of scars:

    puckered, punctured stars, sliced

    crescents, rude tears and gouges

    all ungulate in a lighter hue over

    blue-veined rivers and tendon ridges.

    A skinscape of a crazed topographer;

    a delineation of years of labor,

    of incidences with sharp edges,

    of inabilities, and worst, inattention,

    of flailing arms and careless hands;

    hands with slender fingers

    better spread across opened pages

    gently tapping, counting, calling out the joy.

  • Dying Pine

    The beetle-ridden column of pine, still

    coppery-brown—-stark against a flood

    of deciduous cousins’ May green,

    looms, surrounded by shedded, layered

    bark chunks and brittle limbs detached

    and dropped to litter his meager yard;

    precursors of the fall, numbered in

    days or months, unknowable, to come.

    Still, in wind, his stilted sway of youth,

    but now with creaks and groans of doors

    closing….opening, still offering his body

    to nuthatch, squirrel and the jay and still,

    though fading, his green crescent of a

    smile at his tip-top, unencumbered by

    regrets or daunting musings of mortality.