Posts for June 23, 2025 (page 8)

Tomatoes for salsa
Beans for the freezer
Garlic for everything
Roses for the table
Sunflowers to plant with the grandsons
Lilies to bloom on Father’s birthday
Currants to root me to Germany
Poppies to fix my husband’s frown
Lavender’s dew-spangled scent for all of us
Honeyed birdsong looking for love
Breeze’s breath to rake away clouds
Three generations of hands sifting soil
    sown with child-smiles bright as marigolds
Little ones squealing with fistfuls of worms
    begging kisses to heal bee stings and more
A row of poems, both prickly and plush
    longing to be clothed in petrichor’s quiet hymn
Time’s suspension jumpstarted by grill’s sizzle
    beckoning sun’s see-you-tomorrow wink
    from behind the windbreak

Pots of red 
geraniums dress
the balcony in
dark blue glaze,
clustered petals dance
reach up
invoking peace,
ruffled leaves
satin green
twined in artful arabesque
summer benediction. 

Amish girls in pastel dresses,
like pale pink and blue hibiscus,
wear white bonnets 
and flip flops,
carry brushes
in buckets.

I wallk behind them
in silence near turrets
and wraparound porches
listening for whispers 
of last-century lectures,
melodies from past concerts
hidden under
the hostas and zinnias.

I’m not sure why they hold
my attention. Their freshness?
An air of private camaraderie?
Such modesty amid our shorts
and sundresses.

I wonder about their leaving–
corn fields and chickens
with no chaperones
for day work in Eden?

They don’t attend lectures
or concerts in the village
of abundance.  They may feel
like black-eyed susans,
stretched toward an unfamiliar sun.

We exchange nods.  Before
I can ask a question, 
one girl makes a covert move–
drops a cigarette,
crushes it in ground cover.

The hours unresolved
appear in my dreams unsolved
as long walks to nowhere.

my first summer after I quit (at 20)
the Catholiic seminary (No Girls)
my older brother died (Car Accident) 
and my gay younger brother (By Four Years)
hooked me up with Sharon (16)

after hot days of road construction
I spent evenings with her
in my parents’ Ford Fairlane 

every night until 11:00
we’d park in the woods
behind the Catholic cemetery
and explore love’s painful limitation

mainly we talked,
her knowledge far beyond
my six years of theology

Sharon, beautiful with all those curves
that I felt beneath her clothes
and those extraordinary moments 
among the pin oak trees
when she held my pain like a leaf
fallen through the car window

my parents worried
about all our hours in the back seat
but my brother told them
that as far as love goes
I had no depth preception

after the summer
I left for college 
and left Sharon
with no proper good bye
(my brother was right about me} 

fifteen years later
I saw her again at my father’s funeral
we sat together in a middle pew
held hands 
saw the tears in each others eyes

I live on a  generous grant
but find that I just simply can’t
resist those unique Etsy  buys
no matter how steep or unwise.
So my account dwindles down
as I breeze through the town
with bravado and style
though I know all the while
the more money I spend
the quicker the end.

Lost my sister and
friend to the lies, conspiracies
of our times seeking
fake news rhetoric, hatred
from an unhinged dictator.

swimming further and further back
in this dream, hearing  
the breathing of the trees,
the chorus of your ancestors,   
memory walking in the dark,
that sudden tonnage—
the current circling out in rings—
the vastness of all that has been lost.   

Hold your heart like a flower,   
give over wholly to magic,  
a golden key looking for what it will open:
the mercy of rain
in a wet, green field,
the scent of an unlocked gate.  

Love the full weight of yourself,
a map of wild intention,
the time of your radiance,
that moment of stretching up, up,
unhinged and singing, releasing a tide.
Here is what you hunger for: 
the blue bowl of
sweet, secret abundance.  

We are all here together   
running into our own beginning—
what is beyond words—   
a thirst, a flood.  
Let the overflow catch and keep,
a seed growing.    

~  Cento poem, including the title, from lines/ phrases of W.S. Merwin’s poetry collection Garden Time, Lia Purpura’s poetry collection Stone Sky Lifting, and Anne Sexton’s poetry collection Transformations

Today’s poem, inspired by an interview with Elizabeth Comen.
Warning, uses anatomic terms.

Pudenda (definition): External genitalia, especially female Pudendum/Pudenda (etymology): Thing(s) to be ashamed of (from Latin)

Pudenda reveals an agenda
Pudendum Femininum
The female shame part
Shame part
Part to be ashamed of
Woman, that which is unlike man
Atypical, other, inferior

Woman is man deformed
So said Aristotle, who postulated a world of opposites
Woman, curving, dark, secret, unstable, secret, dark,
Curved, leaky, unbounded
Man, straight, light, open, stable, self-contained, firmly bounded

Man the norm, woman only the appendage
From a rib formed, forbidden fruit eater
Temptress, seductress, bringer of evil

Non pudendum I declare
No longer schamlippen
I honor all that makes me she and
Glory in all my bits and parts

No longer afraid to say
Vagina
Labia
Mons
Pubis
Clitoris

No longer afraid to experience pleasure
Openly, joyfully, loudly
I am woman, watch me soar