The June Bust
No door could hold back
This spring of words, these poems
Surging into shape.
Begin
again
to craft
a verse
each day.
Let June
become
the muse,
inspire
your pen
to write
the ways
of cats
and rain,
delights
of love,
low tides
of grief
and pain.
— Mary L Allen
When it’s my time for dying, don’t want a lot of women hanging around.
When it’s my time to look for God, won’t need a crowd of women standing around.
Just want to feel that one good woman hold my hand down to the ground.
When I’m all done with this body, don’t want to hear a crying sound.
When I’m shaking off this body, won’t care for moaning all around.
Just want to hear one good friend laughing as they slide me in the ground.
And if there’s a Resurrection, won’t need to hear the trumpet sound.
And if there’s a time for rising, won’t need a choir’s angelic sound.
Just my friend and woman saying, “Get your self up off the ground!”
– After a father’s photography
I see him when I see you—
a touch around the nose, a rounded
cheek and chin, the pounds of early years
developing sepia tones.
You carry him—his weight
folded into your being, your art
capturing still frame remnants
of the man—the quiet adoration,
the youthful affection.
When you press your lips, in hushed
conversation with that released
and vital slip of his soul, you capture
immortality. You create a world
from the negatives
just as, here, the slip of a girl
he saw, remains, forever reflected
in the untrained eye
of a man, doing his best
to be enough. At least enough
and never forgetting, or forgotten,
the legacy, floating in a darkened room,
with fingerprints and saline, at the edges,
transforming what was once
so tiny, so insignificant
with his light.
riding the
Midnight Butterfly Express
wearing my
glassy glitter wings I
wonder why everyone
reaches out to touch me
Poem 1, June 1
I live secretly in my poems
Sometimes,
& today is a time of one of those somes,
I admit visitors.
Sometimes, I take no prisoners,
no bums, no chums, no beat of drums,
no For Whom the Wind chimes,
no chimes for Hemingway
no rhymes, living secretly in his words:
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.
that smother their vegetables
in ranch dressing
and don’t know when
to stop
