I’m posting this from my phone. Not a fan of tiny typing, but I’m at the Women’s Winter Shelter, and this is what I have.

Jon and I took the second shift, which means we “slept” from 10 to 2, and we’re the watchers now until six when the other volunteers wake up, and we start new coffee and begin waking up the guests.  There’s a woman here tonight with three children. One is a baby. One is a boy between the ages of our boys. I am trying to imagine what it might be like to be alone with three children and no place to go but an emergency shelter. What reserves of strength must she need to seek? We can offer a night of safety and as peaceful an atmosphere as we can muster. I hope she did get some sleep. I haven’t heard the baby in the night, so at least she has that. (I made little hearts to keep myself awake.)

Gratitude List:
1. Shelter
2. More brilliant moments with the moon.
3. Yarn and a stick.
4. Standing in the gap.
5. Resolve.

May we walk in Beauty.

Late bloom on a magnolia-type tree in the little garden area behind my school.

I feel like I want a disclaimer before I write a poem about sadness. I realize that my life has been free of the iron grip of sadness that many people experience through depression or trauma or deep, recurring grief. I wrote this poem because I am trying to be Rumi’s Guest House and welcome in any and all who come my way, to learn from them what they would teach me. Sometimes I am a poet sitting at a pool, fishing out a single word at a time. Other days, I sit beside the stream, and the poem jumps right out into my lap and only needs to be tidied up a bit before they’re ready for the page.  This is one of the latter, though I think I will need to spend some time fishing for more of an ending.

She’s a strange guest, is Sadness.
She knocks on the door
and when I open it
she turns her face away, says,
“You probably shouldn’t invite me in.”

But when I close the door,
she comes in anyway,
seeping in around the edges of the door
and standing with her back to the wall.
And then she grows.

When I look directly at her, she dissipates
into the indigo shadows,
and all I can see are her eyes,
full of grief, full of resignation.

Sadness. It’s hard to know her, really,
to understand what she wants of me.

Sometimes she comes in as a cold wind
and I feel my senses tingle with the approach of her
before the world goes numb in her silence.

Gratitude List:
1. Goldenrod! Everywhere is goldenrod! I am awash in it. Fields of it along the roadway between Maytown and Elizabethtown. There was goldenrod in almost every flower bouquet at Linda’s viewing the other night. I love that I will now have that association.
2. Learning to greet all the guests (a la Rumi)
3. Going to Hersheypark with my fellas today.
4. How little Greta the Schnauzer loves the kids. She is my mother-in-law’s neighbor dog, and she gets beside herself when we pull in, only settling down quietly to watch after everyone has properly greeted her.
5. A comparatively light grading stack this weekend.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gratitude List:
1. (What was helpful?) Jon, bringing the air conditioner down from the attic so my allergies would settle down, nettle tea, elderberry syrup, ginger tincture, and finally–Dayquil
2. (What did you hear?) The otherworldly sound of that girls’ trio yesterday–like angels, perhaps, but with grit in their voices; and the jazz combo that accompanied them; and the tenor voice that I often hear behind me in chapel; and the rootsy/blue-grassy band that played at the end; oriole, who sends off each morning, and welcomes me home in the afternoon
3. (What draws you forward?) The weekend coming, the summer coming, the sense of a job mostly well done
4. (What inspires you?) Students who have stories of hardship, but who persevere anyway; the rebels and revolutionaries who seek to make a world in which all may be welcome everywhere
5. (What do you see?)  Green, blue, golden sun, orange flame of a bird in the leaves, the eyes of young people learning to love themselves and to love the world

May we walk in Beauty!

I’m beginning to think about planning a late-June trip to the monastery.  I should get that set up soon.

Gratitude List:
1. The amazing music teachers at my school–they draw such music out of the students.
2. The view of the River from my Mountain.  In every season, I am in awe.
3. Saturday morning
4. Family movie night: “The Wizard of Oz.”  At parts, it was even more bizarre than I remembered.  Fun, though, and fun to hear Joss think it through this morning: “Do you think it might have been only a dream?”
5. I’ve been thinking about the process of walking, how each step is an unbalance–a necessary shift in the weight–and a trust that the next foot will restore the balance.  Life can be that way, too–the next thing comes along to throw you a little off-balance, but it’s part of keeping you in the forward motion, and you have to trust that the work and the energy and the determination of the moment will catch you on the next step, so you’ll be ready for the next unbalancing motion.

May we walk in Grace and Beauty.

A red-shouldered hawk skims the branches
and settles onto the long arm of a walnut.
She ruffles her feathers and settles herself
to watch the grasses below for disturbances.
The slightest deviation will grab her attention,
an errant breeze that tweaks the foxtail,
a caterpillar wriggling across a leaf of plantain.

Gratitude List:
1. Poem in your Pocket Day.  Yesterday was Wrightsville’s version of Poem in Your Pocket Day.  Children of our town are encouraged to take their poems to several businesses around town and read poems to the people who work there.  In response, the businesses offer them little gifties and discounts and coupons from the business.  There were groups of families and children walking all around town yesterday afternoon.  We kept arriving at certain places at about the same time as another family–they became our cohort.  The people at the different businesses were incredibly kind and thoughtful and affirming of the children as they read their poems.  At Marcello’s Pizza, the man came out from behind the counter and crouched down so he could be sure he heard my 7yo son’s poem.  While we were there, we found a poem on the floor–one that someone had lost.  It was apparently written for the occasion because it praised one of the teachers from the school.  Community-building.  Literacy-building.  Child-affirming.  Small Business affirming.  Poetry-affirming.  Perfect.
2. Rain.  I love spring rain.
3. Does spring always take this long to unfold?  The pinks this year seem to go on forever, and the baby greens are so prevalent.  I love this slow unfolding.
4. A cat who loves me.  I am struggling a bit with this at the moment, because he HAS to be on my lap, and he has to try to pet me–to try to get me to pet him–but his paws are so arthritic that he cannot retract his claws, and so I feel like a pincushion. He’s such a snuggler.
5. Stories.

May we walk in Beauty!

Today’s prompt is to write an echo poem.  This is a gift.  I have been frustrated this month with the way I have struggled to settle back into my voice.  I know that writing a poem a day means that many will be junk, but I can’t seem to find the threads of myself in my writing this month.  Two days ago, I felt it again, that sense that I was in the poem, finally.  And yesterday, I desperately wanted to hold it, but it just unraveled.

But today, the prompt is to write an echo poem.  He suggested that an echo might be a re-vision of an earlier poem, or perhaps a response to an earlier poem.  I am trying to work out both of those–to echo Monday’s poem and to revise yesterday’s.  I think I have almost accomplished it.  It’s going to need some more revision work, but it’s definitely finding its way.

Love, she leads me out in the street,
leaving History muttering to herself
in the corner booth of the cafe.

“How can we fix her?” I ask, but Love
is silent.  She points her finger down the street,
where sun is streaming golden through the leaves
falling from a yellow maple.  “Don’t you just–”
she asks, “love that?”  And Yes fills me,
and a shining thread stretches golden
from us to the tree.  “And that?”  She points
to children racing higgledy-piggledy down the sidewalk.
Laughter echoes off the walls.  I nod and see
the glimmering thread between us.

A tired-eyed mother carrying her child.  Yes.
Pigeons fighting for a crust of bread.
Pigeons, yes.  Bread, yes.
A self-assured pup pulling his woman on a leash.
Dog.  Woman.  Her violet eyes.  The shifting shades
of red and russet in her woven stole.  Yes, and yes,
and yes again.  And yes to the man sleeping on the grate,
and the girl who has brought him a cup of steaming coffee.

A glittering web fills the square, shifting in the sunlight,
quivering in the breathing spaces between us all.

“Ah!” I sigh.  I see it now.  “This is how
we untangle History
from her self-repeating cycle!
Cast the web and revel in its shine!”
But Love is not yet smiling.

“There!” She points to a battered crow,
holes in the fringes of its wings,
winging home from warring with an owl.
“Even that,” I say.  “It is the way of crows,
of owls.  I love the crow.” The web is cast
between us.  Voices rise as we pass
through shadows, marching feet in lock-step.

Love points–“And those?”
Like the crows, perhaps, it is the way
of sheep to follow wolves.  And yet,
the web has faltered slightly,
gone grey and wispy, sagging,
but intact.  I hear History whispering,
“Inevitability, Sister.”  Still, my heart
can see around the edges, hold the strands.
I have done this work before.

But Love points again, this time
to the leader himself, the leering
lying demagogue, leading the sheep
to their doom, to ours.  A babbling buffoon–

The web is falling, tangling around me.
“And this one?” Love looks on, solemn-eyed:
“I think you see that here is where your work begins.”

Gratitude List:
1. Tabula rasa.  Sometimes you get a do-over on a clean sheet.
2. Binge-watching The West Wing.
3. The goldfinches twittering in the sunlight.
4. Sunlight.
5. Sleeping in.  My body let me sleep until 6, and then I managed to doze until after 7.  Glorious.  I might take a nap, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

 

Erf. Today’s prompt is to write a technology/anti-technology poem. I love to rant about technology, but I don’t know if I can whip up a poem about it in the fifteen minutes before I have to leave for school.  It’ll have to be a place-holder.

See how it serves you?
The world at your fingertips,
and that such a thrill
that we miss the cliche.

See how it frees you?
All that you need
right there in your hand.
You’re never more
than the press of a button
away from work or diversion,
but the one who breathes beside you
is now a thousand clicks away.

Gratitude List:
1. How the valleys and hollows hold the early morning mist
2. How people hold each other
3. How eyes shine with a new idea
4. How the work just gets done
5. How the air comes alive when the children sing

May we walk in Beauty!