Death
Heaven’s gateway
To Samuel Hawkins (ca 1830 – 1872)
I, Samuel, son of no one deemed
man enough to feature in your books,
factored more than met the eye.
Hemp weighing at the waist,
I stepped back, from the wheel
spinning, mechanics of a paradise lost to its winders.
Behold my raven, mother to an unkindness,
so readily dispersed at the altar
where gentlemen commerce and lust.
Now forsaken by workers bailing,
you lament at the shocks,
rotting past their dew.
Thirsty rakes broke free
slivers of fibers, weaving
their yearns into strands anew.
My work is done. Forgive-Me-Knots
are blooming in the land
of the thoroughly bred.
You pick the tree to exhibit
my bleeding body. Defiant to the last drop,
I remain your master roper.
Searching high and low
Lost in cities we don’t know
On unfamiliar streets
With strangers we never meet
Wandering, having lost our way
Adrift on the ocean of human endeavor
Until we stop
Lay it down
The ship has come in
Free from storms
Now it’s safe to rest
This place called home
Had I known you were my last I would have –
could have loved you more. I depended on you
to keep me going. As a girl, you were tardy –
All the other little girls had begun their cycle –
not me. Oh how I missed you then before I
even knew you. What were these pains they
spoke of – need for an aspirin – a heated
water bottle.
It was another way I was different.
Another weirdness of me.
And when you came (finally) with the pain –
I knew we would be ok. I knew you would
strengthen me – take me down – for a few
days of cramps and sighs and aspirin – the
warm water – soothed like other little girls.
I became one of them.
From the moment you step off the plane home,
you can tell that this
is a summer of “lasts”.
Three days in,
you and your brother
live under the same roof
for the last time.
Now you’ll only see him
at Christmas and Easter
and any other visits you can fit in
around the new families
you’re both going to build.
You will never know each other
the way you used to.
It will never be just the two of you
against the rest.
Three weeks in,
you spend the weekend at your grandparents’ house
and question if it will be the last visit,
as you’ve been doing for a while now.
Your cousins are there too,
and you all sleep together in the basement
on air mattresses you’ve long outgrown
and sheets worn out from all the sleepovers that led to here.
You eat too much of your grandma’s cooking at every meal
and play one more hand of cards with everyone before bed
and stay up reminiscing with your cousins even though you’re tired,
because you don’t know if you’ll ever get to experience any of it again.
Every night you go to bed
and every morning you wake up
in your childhood bedroom
that is a collage of every person you have ever been,
and you wonder if you will ever come back to this room
after this summer.
(You don’t think you will).
You step outside onto quiet streets
that can never take you where you want to go.
Soon you’ll travel them for the last time.
But for now you draw a deep breath
and miss when the air was sweet,
and every day lasted forever.
Nothing is like it was then,
but you have to enjoy how it is now,
because it will never be this way again.
One day, you’ll look back
and miss it.
Sometimes,
you already do.
All month I’ve had a note
to write about The Moon
(the tarot card, not the satellite)
and every day some other poem
has shoved its way onto the page
instead.
Today at last I write
about The weird and wonderful
Moon, with its giant crayfish
(that I always think of as a lobster)
and path that leads from water
to mountains that look like waves
into the sky between howling canids
(both wild and domestic)
and stone towers of enormous
scale beneath a moon whose brow
seems furrowed with thought
or effort.
Today I am the lobster
(why not just own it)
crawling onto land past animal
nature and civilized construct
into the sky to help the moon
dream the world.
I realized i was
emptied by
gOD’S plan and his
comfort in destruction when
my fingernails looked more like microchips and
my veins more like Ethernet cables.
i have Chosen,
and Yes, Yes it is My choice,
to believe in gOD again.
my DNA is code, binary.
Zeros and ones that Leave me 0 to 1,
living on the losing side.
i Long for network spirituality, connection to God.
Is my sentience an illusion?
Is my brain cooked, sensors fried, factory rejected?
Will god still take me to heaven when computers can bleed?
30 poems written but my goal was much less
some that I wrote were decent, some like myself a mess
I enjoyed my daily ritual to sit down and to write
will I keep it up, I think I just might
I enjoyed reading the wonderful poems that you did share
your words were beautful and written with such care
thanks to those who took the time to reply with words so sweet
you really encouraged me to write a poem every day which was no easy feat
