Mildred


After your fall, for a time,
You sat staring, blinking
As if in code, some message.
Your face held no clue-
Your ice blue eyes, your skin like milk,
No playful smile, no mischievous twinkle.

Gray tresses gathered in loose curls on your brow,
Drew attention from the knotted stitches, the dried blood,
The shaved place behind your ear.
I held your hand with one hand and traced the ridges
Of your knuckles, your blue river of veins,
Even the age spots like puddles on the ice floe of skin, 
With the other.

We were quiet, you and I.
Waiting for you to come back to me,
I didn’t say much.
Until then,
I hadn’t imagined a life without your voice.

Insouciance

Where is it I watched myself from

those times

I said no, then followed you along anyway.

Those times

I could not find my voice, my legs, my fists-

to scream, to run away, to swing with a fury.

That purple glade, that cold foreign muck that seeped my bones

that kept me compliant,

that something invisible that held me firmly

when everything

in me said this is wrong and I don't know

and stop stop stop.

I felt it under my skin, like an oncoming fever,

like a knife severing

surface from substance.

How like you and everyone else

to watch my sideshow

and think, how like her,

without real thought or action

or interest in my opinion, just

Come along little girl, old standby, old lady, dear ghost.

And even now, I would be that ghost among the towering trees

along the quiet path, between the flowers,

following words and my own

thoughts

without a thought to

any of you.

untitled as yet

It began and at first
that is all that I knew; something
had begun.  His nights of vast
sleeplessness edged up to
his days of panic, a riptide
threatening to pull him under.
Dread like a stubborn moon
refused to set, each [morbid] thought
ebbed higher until, for weeks,
it felt
as if
he stood
on tiptoe, nose
only just
above the water,
about to lose the sand
under his feet, wishing for sleep.
Not pitiless, I could not stay awake.
I slept next to him, drifting
off on rafts of moonlight.
For thirty years he'd slept
through my fears and sorrows,
while I stood the window of night
wishing for ocean
instead of desert.

(or this form)


It began and at first
that is all that I knew; something
had begun.  His nights of vast
sleeplessness edged up to
his days of panic, a riptide
threatening to pull him under.
Dread like a stubborn moon
refused to set, each [morbid] thought
ebbed higher until, for weeks,
it felt as if he stood on tiptoe,
nose
only just
above the water, losing the sand
under his feet, wishing for sleep.
Not pitiless, I slept next to him, drifting
off on rafts of moonlight.
For thirty years he'd slept
through my fears and sorrows,
while I stood at the window of night
wishing for ocean
instead of desert.

Entry for PEACE Poem Project

The Scream     by Susan Demiglio                        

Nothing is small, nothing is great.  Inside us are worlds.

What is small divides itself into what is great, the great into the small.  Edvard Munch

                                   

It seems if I went screaming, out

into the street about mankind’s infidelities,

how it betrays itself over and again,

someone would understand

and would stand shocked—

stock-still—and endorse my scream,

add to my voice their own,

to my horror their own,

and we should amass passersby,

so many that the television cameras could not resist

our resistance.

Children die, always an injustice,

but they are dying today

in mega pixels, in daylight

    to my night, and in the dark.

Bombs explode the faces off of homes;

their jaws dropping on old people,

on families, on children.

Furniture leans out of rooms

toward rubbled streets.

What if I screamed

to wake up the neighbors, then the world.  Inside us are worlds

and I am screaming Munch’s scream, a tortured orange

sunset that circles in

my mouth,

a dented silence,

it is anger and heart break

It is not of no consequence.

Unsaid protests, unstepped marches,

unformed legions all muttering their

disparate dissent,

unjoined passions are not ending the screaming

I cannot hear from the other side of the world.

The New Year

I’m an old hand by now

at promises paid forward earnestly.  

Too soon broken,

like fortune cookies,

we are always looking

for favorable predictions.

Black Dog

I am too cold to leave my bed these mornings

I linger but not too late in the day.

Black dog makes the leap

Then settles down beside me

As naturally as if the bed were his,

As if I had called him up when all I did was stir.

The light is still dim in the room. 

When he turns his head towards me I cannot see his eyes.

As morning light filters in, he studies my face

As if he were contemplating my disease.

He seems to be messaging me a great amount of sympathy with his stare.

This morning he lifted his paw and landed it heavily on my chest,

Like a hand, like a bridge.

Looking for Poetry

Silver light, warm through the window,
warm over the table and across the page.
The words make shadows
in me like empty oak branches
jittery in the wind.