your password was found in a leak.
we strongly recommend you change it.
what’s the worst that could happen?
someone could hack in
and write
better
than
me
?
I fed on what I fed.
You held the air
like lungs hold it.
I’d imp you:
splice a borrowed quill
to the broken pinion,
knit the wing to bone,
call it mine.
Come to the fist,
the altar where they
alter what they keep.
I cannot hold you
past the door’s slow close.
Hang at the lip of the stoop,
altared in the act of falling,
gold and not descending.
There are words the mountains whisper
When the moon is thin and white,
Spells that never found a paper,
Only carried through the night.
From a Granny bent with seasons,
Hands like bark on ancient pine,
Passing charms from tongue to memory,
Older than the church bell’s chime.
She said,
“Gather dew before the sunrise,
Leave no footprint in the frost.
Thank the creek before you drink it,
Or you’ll wander good as lost.”
So I walked the rhododendron,
With a hickory wand in hand,
Pocket full of iron horseshoes,
River clay and mountain sand.
Found a feather from a raven,
Three black stones beneath a beech,
Mixed them with the smoke of cedar—
Things no preacher dared to preach.
The forest answered softly,
Like a choir without a name.
Leaves bowed low to greet the stranger
Who remembered every flame.
Foxfire lit the hidden footpaths,
Trilliums bent without the breeze,
And the whippoorwill quit singing
As I spoke among the trees.
I learned the creek has hidden language,
Every ripple tells a tale.
One can call the rain by humming,
One can calm the fiercest gale.
Mist will hide a faithful traveler
If your heart is clean and true,
But the mountain knows a liar—
It remembers more than you.
I stitched the wind into a blanket
For a child with winter’s cough,
Hung rowan over cabin doorways,
Kept the hungry darkness off.
Marked the lintel with red ochre,
Burned sweet sage beside the fire;
Every ember held a promise,
Every spark a small desire.
Yet magic here is never master,
Never bent to greed or pride.
It walks beside the humble only,
Keeping quiet at their side.
Those who seek it just for power
Leave with nothing but their fear,
For the oldest spells in Appalachia
Only bloom when love is near.
Now the young folks call it folklore,
Old wives’ tales and country lies,
While they watch the glowing city
Fill the bottoms with its lights.
Still the ridges keep their secrets,
Still the owls know every name,
Still the mountains wake at midnight
Wrapped in emerald-colored flame.
And when my hair is white as dogwood,
When my hands are lined like stone,
I’ll pass the old words to another
By the hearth we’ve always known.
Not in books nor grand cathedrals,
Not where kings have made their mark—
But beside an Appalachian fire,
Where magic kindles in the dark.
The wind has been pushing me around as long as I’ve known her. Yet nothing prepared me for meeting her on the flatlands where her violence frightened me as she tried to steal the clothes from my body and the hair from my head. I forgot how cold and distant she can be when we returned home to the shores of Lake Ontario. Clearly she inherited more than her share of the Canadian. Her tantrums are legend and one cannot know what will set her off to tear ancient trees out by their roots and lift roofs from their houses and shake the glass in the windows. I have spent a lifetime sheltering in the hills and the hollers to avoid her chilly demeanor. But I will admit here, in this cave where she does not reach, that once in a great while I will hike to the peaks just to feel again her touch on my face.
Sometimes her sighs are
so deep they send a shiver
down my spine to tail.
How many spaces I have occupied in this lifetime
starting first in my mother’s womb
an unexpected surprise
I would learn
leaving me wondering for years
was I ever really truly wanted here
after me came a sister and twin brothers t
his made a much more complicated space
very little room shared by many
always looking for a voice and my place
in this space.
A pattern would establish that would take years to see
always caring for others first
in this space
still trying to find my place
not ever really knowing if I fit here
in this space.
Next up a family of my own
still no dedicated room or a place that I felt was my space.
beginning to see the choices I made
from the care giving pattern
left me outside looking in
everyone need more
it was my job after all
to care for this family we created
in the space
we occupied and built a home ,
allow them room to grow and create their own space
searching and looking
finally understanding that space
I desired was the fire that warmed my home
whenever I shared my loved
my space was always with me
in my heart
there is where I found my home.
He watches, misty-eyed
as his father
shuffles across the room.
Though his body rejects
his mind’s efforts
to move, to speak, to touch,
he remains present
in soul, spirit.
How cruel, that mental cage.
Over the past eight years,
I have observed
my Dad while he grapples
with the reality
that his father’s
path is long-suffering.
“This visit may be our
last,” he told me
on the Gulf shore last week.
“They plan to sell the home
by December.”
A gem in my childhood.
A beauty of St. Pete.
Sanctuary,
I called it in my youth.
Through grief, through hurricanes,
it stands upright.
Though its foundation may change,
the memories it holds,
the warmth it gives,
will never be shaken,
will never be taken,
nor forgotten
from the hearts he has touched.
wrote; she was kicked in
the head but still likes horses
Proof she lost her mind—
try to be kind an empty
head—nonsense is its best sense.
