Sunshine and gratitude

I am grateful for the sun today. Also for the good coffee and Charlie, the dog sleeping nearest me. Making plans to work outdoors, in the back yard.


Now an impromptu poem to keep the momentum going as I attempt a poem a day:


The Night

Night descended like a bird, broad sweep
of black feathers following me
into dreams, companion to my sleep.
Stars collected across the sky
like Sentinels with a watch to keep
on their way around the world.

I was aware of its dispassionate eye
observing my tremulous slumber.
I felt it lifting, with no caw or cry,
toward the dawn, shaking off the dew and
I followed. No matter how I try,
this morning there is void where once was dream.

Collected into some deep place,
with other dreams, my  slip
into the pysche's song is gone. The space
where last night lived a thought, color and voice,
there is an image; a feathered sharp-billed face,
then black cloak of lifting to the sky.

Okay, not necessarily a good poem, but.....

Witch Hazel

Slight yellow tags for blossoms,
the first to bloom this year;
before the forysthia with its swollen nodes
before the star magnolia with white-tipped buds.

Vincent's Ear

Sometimes I must bleed from somewhere
to see the pain I feel, must
bleed the real from the surreal.
There is a punishment in the silence
of the staring stars, in the overhang of sky.
It is no wonder I punish the ear.
What I hear and don't
are weights, are judgements I cannot escape, cannot defend myself against.
Love should mark us,
change us, scar us; if not for good,
then forever.

If I should die

before I wake, my soul is up for grabs--
that green room of my mind
prepares me for nothing. A child’s
prayer leads me by the hand through
dreams; hallways like throats,
dark and self-lubricating. The voice

before the swallow, the belly grumbles
while we pray, the need never seems
to leave. God, bless the daddy
of all-white children, those he terrorized
and the ones he did not.
Daddy, bless those children with
all-white children.

His love
for me unbent
like a coathanger snaking
through dark sensibility, snagging
anything foreign. If I should die
before this yearning breaks, a flood
around my feet....God bless the mommy and the daughter,

and the grandchildren, cinnamon and small. Say
a fragile prayer of something better
than grandpa’s hate for
that fragment of his population, dear daddy-god,
that he won’t reclaim. Bless God, I will not wait.

What do I Say

What do I say
to the four year old
who wants to know

Why? His eyes shining
like an Oracle who
owns the Truth. Do I
tell him the world is full
of families rejecting
little brown baby

bundles of joy? That
love is often smaller
than hate and is pain-
ful in the long hours
of the night? Some-
one began judging him

when he was inches long,
someone was biased
from birth, his birth;
before he was officially
ours, those moments
when all I could think of
was, “Breathe Breathe Breathe.”

I never thought I would
trade one family member
for another, but as far
as I’m concerned, I traded up.
What do I say? I say the Stars
and the Moon, the Merry-Go-Rounds
of Sunflowers. I say fat pink

Earthworms and Books Books Books.
I say Tomorrow and Always, I say Stay
Near and Hold Tight.

I say Breathe Breathe
Breathe to him, to us.