wondrous how those words would come back and make
him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died—the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.
Cathryn Essinger
Summer Apples
I planted an apple tree in memory
of my mother, who is not gone,
but whose memory has become
so transparent that she remembers
slicing apples with her grandmother
(yellow apples; blue bowl) better than
the fruit that I hand her today. Still,
she polishes the surface with her thumb,
holds it to the light and says with no
hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .
they’re so fragile, you can almost see
to the core. She no longer remembers how
to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but
her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants.
And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core—
to that little cathedral to memory—where
the seeds remember everything they need
to know to become yellow and transparent.
Lynne Knight
Third Year of My Mother’s Dementia
I looked out the window and it filled with peacocks,
flaring their many eyes at me. I had been waiting
for months for some sign, and now from the high bank
where I was so often afraid to climb blared cries
of the peacocks as they fluttered and dipped
their soft plumules. One lay down to sleep
like a human, positioned on its side, and its fan
folded back into itself, into nothing but a long
dull tail. The others kept moving up and down the bank,
so many eyes I could not count them. They ignored
the sleeping one. Stepped over him, or rushed by
with a swish. As they would rush by me, if I stood
among them in my wonder that beauty is needed
most of all when it is useless, when it fixes nothing.
Heather Swan
Rabbit
After a long numbness, I wake
and suddenly I’m noticing everything,
all of it piercing me with its beautiful,
radical trust: the carpenter bee tonguing
the needles of echinacea believing
in their sweetness, the exuberance
of an orange day lily unfolding itself
at the edge of the street, and the way
the moss knows the stone, and the stone
accepts its trespass, and the way the dog
on his leash turns to see if I’m holding on,
certain I know where to go. And the way
the baby rabbit—whose trembling ears
are the most delicate cups—trusts me,
because I pried the same dogs’ jaws
off his hips, and then allows me to feed him
clover when his back legs no longer work,
forcing me to think about forgiveness
and those I need to forgive, and to hope
I am forgiven, and that just maybe
I can forgive myself. This unstoppable,
excruciating tenderness everywhere inviting
us, always inviting. And then later, the firefly
illuminating the lantern of its body,
like us, each time we laugh.
Dale Biron
Laughter
When the
face we wear
grows old and weathered, torn
open by time,
colors
tinted as dawn
like the late
winter mountains
of Sedona
ashen and crimson,
it will no longer
be possible
to distinguish
our deepest scars
from the long
sweet lines left
by laughter.
January Gill O’Neil
In the Company of Women
Make me laugh over coffee,
make it a double, make it frothy
so it seethes in our delight.
Make my cup overflow
with your small happiness.
I want to hoot and snort and cackle and chuckle.
Let your laughter fill me like a bell.
Let me listen to your ringing and singing
as Billie Holiday croons above our heads.
Sorry, the blues are nowhere to be found.
Not tonight. Not here.
Only contours. Only curves.
Each sip takes back a pound,
each dry-roasted swirl takes our soul.
Can I have a refill, just one more?
Let the bitterness sink to the bottom of our lives.
Let us take this joy to go.
Alice Wolf Gilborn
Leaning to the Light
Our neighbor planted twelve
bulbs in the shadow of his barn
in the shadow of the trees
in the shadow of a mountain.
And now a dozen lilies grow
at an angle toward the sun
that touches them only
in the afternoon. Our neighbor
sold his house to strangers
who come for just a week
or two so they never see
their flowers bloom, later
than the rest, their soft pink
petals tinged with white,
curled like shavings, stamen
tuned to the western sky.
Like me since I left the land
where I was born, leaning west,
these laggard lilies with mouths wide
open, drinking in the setting sun.
Andrea Potos
I Watched an Angel in the Emergency Room
Tall in twilit
blue sneakers, feet winged
to the task of holding
my mother’s hand as
he explained the source
of the infection, all it will take
to restore her
to the stronghold of
this earth that has known her
eight decades and more, the gate
of her body where my gratitude begins.
Alberto Ríos
When Giving Is All We Have
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
Albert Garcia
Offering
Here, take this palmful of raspberries
as my gift. It isn’t much
but we’ve often said our needs
are simple, some quiet
time alone on the patio
in the cool morning, coffee,
a few words over the newspaper.
I’ve rinsed these berries
so you can tumble them
right into your cereal, one minute
on the vine, the next in your bowl,
my hand to your mouth.
Let’s say my words were as simply
sweet as these berries, chosen
as carefully, plucked and held,
then delivered as perfect
morsels of meaning. Not
what you hear, which is never
what I mean to say. Will you take
these berries? Will you feel their weight
on your tongue, taste their tang
as they slide into you, small, bright, honest:
the only gift I have to give?
Alison Luterman
Too Many to Count
My father hands me the bucket and scissors
and asks me to go cut peonies: white, pink, magenta.
Tightly balled and slightly unfurled,
they’ve multiplied like crazy on the slope behind his house.
Long ago, Dad taught himself to garden out of books.
My childhood was fat with exulted-over tomatoes,
blueberry bushes covered with cheesecloth,
and a zillion profligate zucchinis,
which caused an outbreak of zucchini bread,
zucchini muffins, and ill-fated zucchini pizza crust,
inciting both my brothers to go on a zucchini strike
that has lasted to this day.
But these peonies!
God must have been a little stoned when She dreamed them up,
not stopping at one petticoat or two,
but piling layer upon layer, until even the exhausted bees
surrender to excessive lingerie.
I stuff the bucket with closed buds
and half-opened blooms showing their lacy knickers
and trudge back up the steep-sloped hill to the house,
leaving behind a glowing field of peonies, too many to count,
like my father’s many kindnesses over the decades—
pots of soup, loaves of home-baked bread,
hours of earnest listening,
all offered with the same voluptuous generosity
as now when he takes the laden bucket from my arms
and tells me to divide the bounty into smaller bunches
so he can distribute them among the neighbors.
Marjorie Saiser
If I Carry My Father
I hope it is a little more
than color of hair
or the dimple or cheekbones
if he’s ever here in the space I inhabit
the room I walk in
the boundaries and peripheries
I hope it’s some kindness he believed in
living on in cell or bone
maybe some word or action
will float close to the surface
within my reach
some good will rise when I need it
a hard dense insoluble shard
will show up
and carry on.
George Bilgere
Weather
My father would lift me
to the ceiling in his big hands
and ask, How’s the weather up there?
And it was good, the weather
of being in his hands, his breath
of scotch and cigarettes, his face
smiling from the world below.
O daddy, was the lullaby I sang
back down to him as he stood on earth,
my great, white-shirted father, home
from work, his gold wristwatch
and wedding band gleaming
as he held me above him
for as long as he could,
before his strength failed
down there in the world I find myself
standing in tonight, my little boy
looking down from his flight
below the ceiling, cradled in my hands,
his eyes wide and already staring
into the distance beyond the man
asking him again and again,
How’s the weather up there?
Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Work
I could tell they were father and son,
the air between them, slack as though
they hardly noticed one another.
The father sanded the gunwales,
the boy coiled the lines.
And I admired them there, each to his task
in the quiet of the long familiar.
The sawdust coated the father’s arms
like dusk coats grass in a field.
The boy worked next on the oarlocks
polishing the brass until it gleamed
as though he could harness the sun.
Who cares what they were thinking,
lucky in their lives
that the spin of the genetic wheel
slowed twice to a stop
and landed each of them here.
Reflective Pause
The Joy of Making
Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s “Work” shows two people steeped in the joy of what they’re doing. They seem to be beaming, the fullness of their gratitude and good luck suddenly contagious.
We share her relief at watching this father and son build a boat together, disengaged from the technology that can disconnect us from each other. We all crave a creative outlet like this and can deeply enjoy being so involved in the task of making something that we lose all sense of time. In the space of creativity and cooperation, we also lose touch with our self for a while and shed those anxious thoughts that can be fed by social media and news.
This poem urges us to bear loving witness to the world as it is, to find beauty in the simple scene of a father and son coming together to accomplish something much larger than themselves. She points to “the spin of the genetic wheel” that led them, and each of us, to this very moment in our lives, and invites us to feel the luck of having become exactly who we are right now.
Invitation for Writing and Reflection
Can you remember a time when you felt so consumed with the act of making something that you lost all sense of time, and your mind seemed to clear? What allowed you to enter this mindful creative space?
Danusha Laméris
Goldfinches
Good luck, they say,
to see one,
its face and breast
pure citrus
against the grey sky.
And today,
I am twice blessed
because two such birds
grace the low boughs
of the persimmon,
eating the soft heart
of winter’s fruit—
though they will also
feast on thistles
pulled from the dry flowers
and so are said
to eat the thorns
of Christ’s crown,
to lift some small measure
of his suffering.
Whatever your grief,
however long you’ve carried it—
may something
come to you,
quick and unexpected,
whisk away
the bristled edge
in its sharp
and tender beak.
Connie Wanek
The Lesser Goldfinch
It was hardly bigger than an apricot,
a goldfinch, yes, but smaller and paler,
a little ghost in the lavender
eating seeds too tiny for
my old eyes. Sometimes I think
Heaven needn’t measure
even two by two
inches, much less all the sky
above the Vatican;
for peace is lodged deep
within the very
spacious thought of itself.
Quiet bird, your gestures
are vast in such a place
as I dream of.
Tony Hoagland
The Word
Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
between “green thread”
and “broccoli,” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”
Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing
that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,
but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom
still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
—to anyone among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.
Barbara Crooker
Tomorrow
there will be sun, scalloped by clouds,
ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.
It will be a temperate seventy-five, low
humidity. For twenty-four hours,
all politicians will be silent. Reality
programs will vanish from TV, replaced
by the “snow” that used to decorate
our screens when reception wasn’t
working. Soldiers will toss their weapons
in the grass. The oceans will stop
their inexorable rise. No one
will have to sit on a committee.
When twilight falls, the aurora borealis
will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet.
We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,
decorate our hair with fireflies, spin
until we’re dizzy, collapse
on the dew-decked lawn and look up,
perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines
of cold code written in the stars . . .
Cynthia White
Quail Hollow
Think of the path as calligraphy—