Now You've Got To Be Strong

Now you've got to draw close.
Wrap your arms around your body, use you hands to
Protect your heart.
Create some sort of barrier.
Do the hard things you aren't sure you can do.

Now you've got be strong.
Not give anything away.
Hold your hand across your mouth
And not give fear a voice.

Now you're going to become familiar with a new sort of chaos.
With things that will hurt and damage.
Familiar with watching someone you love more than yourself fall apart.
Familiar with distance and not being able to reach them sometimes.

Now your heart will break
And you will cry a million private tears,
Into towels in the bathroom
While you do your makeup.
Into pillows.
Into your hands.
At any time of day.
And maybe no one believes you.
Or maybe they think it's your fault.
You haven't done enough.
You have done too much,
In any case, you can never win.
There will always be those who see the ways you have failed with this.

But now you have to focus.
On moments.  The small singular softer moments.
On loving and loving and reassuring that you love,

Now you must become the safest harbor there is.
The very safest place you could ever imagine
For someone who is hurting in ways you don't understand.
Now you have to open your arms
And make room for all this sorrow.
You slowly kneel on the floor and collect shattered pieces of everything broken.
Lego. Glass. Hearts.
All in disarray.
Now you have to try
To put everything back together,

Now you've got to be stronger than you expected you'd need to be.
And you can be.
You can be
Both warrior and peacemaker
Both a storm and a safe place
For the ones you love.

Haiku and the Fragmented Heart

I was always a girl in love with words.

I began a love affair with poetry in a second hand bookshop in the city near our small prairie town when I was around twelve.

After passing stacks of comic books, piles and piles of regency romance and popular mystery novels, I found several dusty shelves at the very back of the shop heavy with once well-loved and well read collections of poetry.  Thin volumes and thick, often in rich burgundy binding.  Visually beautiful.  I felt like a girl in a novel when I would reach up almost cautiously, hoping my fingers would land on just the right volume and lift it reverently off the shelf, gently wipe the dust from its cover.  Magic.

I had long had an affinity for old, forgotten things.  A legacy from my Icelandic grandfather who owned three antique\ junk shops in the Chatham area before he up and sold it all and moved to Haiti, where he remained for the rest of his life, building houses, writing letters, working with those who had nothing material to call their own.  He became known down on that ravaged island as their beloved "grand-père".  He wrote that the children would hold hands and dance after him wherever he walked or near wherever he worked singing about the kindness of their white grand-père.

My own memories of him begin with hot sunlight, dust billowing up behind his old rusty car as we drove down the dirt lanes of the prairies in search of dusty treasures for sale in someone's barn.  Some colorful beads, some unusual glassware, something strange and unexpected.  I was a very little girl but I remember clearly the thrill of possibility.

That thrill never quite left me.  The possibility of finding treasure in old bookshops is one that still makes my heart beat faster.

I spent a lot of my time reading poetry.  I began with what was easiest and most available to me, the flowery poems of the Romantic period.  I spent a long time reading them but the words never quite spoke to the deepest and purest part of my soul.  They never quite reached me.  I was simply reading the wrong sort of poetry for the person I am.

Many years later, I am discovering the poets that do.  I recognize them as though they were my dearest friends.  Soulmates of sorts. Their thoughts resonate deeply in my heart.  They make me set down my book, shut my eyes and repeat their words again and again until I feel my soul lift and heal.  The words aren't pretty or flowery but they are deeply, authentically beautiful.

We need this sort of thoughtful, painful beauty in our lives.  There is too much rushing, too much fragmentation of the soul, too much distraction and devoting our time to things that don't matter.  There is little time for art, for lingering, for simply being.

I also feel that along with poetry,  the art of the haiku, especially those of Japanese poet Basho, bring us back to the core of ourselves.  Their simplicity is staggering and profound.  Alluring.  The focus on nature puts our hearts where they are comfortable residing.  Through haiku we are able to focus on one thing at a time.  We are able to feel deeply.  This is peaceful and healing.

Basho's words in the following verse are hauntingly beautiful.

Deep autumn,
How does my neighbor live I wonder?

This verse was the first of Basho's I stumbled upon while reading the book "Under the Tuscan Sun" and like it touched the author of that book, it also touched me deeply.  As a girl in love with words, as a woman who feels we are often live disconnected from all life and from others although the desire for connection is at the heart of all we undertake, it spoke to me.

I began with this haiku and I sought out books of Basho's other work and it was like quenching a thirst.  I felt the world begin to whisper in my ears again.  In the same way it when I was a child.  In the same way it did before smart phones and technology conspired to keep our eyes glued to the screens in front of us and safely off the souls around us.  Keep us from the risk of feeling deeply.  Of loving even when it hurts and challenges us.  The hard work of living.

Haiku show us that the magic is still there.  In a leaping frog.  In a quiet village.  In a still pond.  In every bird that breaks our heart with its song.

                                --------------------------------------------------------------------

(I connect these words to my memories of my grandfather because he lived a life of deep commitment and connection to those he served through his work.  He saw how his neighbor (in his case, the people of Haiti) lived and set about meeting them where they were.  Loving them through the work he did, through the humor and simple acceptance he showed them, through his life of giving up in order than others could have.  It might seem odd for me to draw a connection between a wandering Buddhist monk\ poet with a deep love of nature and my workaholic, chain smoking Catholic Icelandic grandfather but it really isn't.  They share this.  Profound love, be it of nature or of others.  A disdain for material items.  A desire to do better than the minimum society tells us we should do.  They were both perhaps, unconventional.

Two men of deep thought and profound intelligence.  Men of both words and action.)

Writing Poetry on New Year's Eve

It's done and I can't think what to tell you.
I'm somehow less
Than before.
It hasn't gotten better, but worse.
But it hasn't only gotten worse, but also better.
I don't feel like raising a glass
And thanking the year that has come and gone.
I don't feel like showing the world
That I am polished, enlightened, serene.
I don't feel like subtly asking you to admire me
And how far I have come
How much I have grown and learned.

The illusion of charmingly imperfect perfection.
A show for an audience barely watching.
And quite forgetful.

It's done now and I feel a vague disquiet.
The thought that someday
It will be better,
This grounding and necessary, determined hope that I will be better.

There's a lot I refuse to accept.
I don't buy for example, this bland notion that our best is good enough.
That our failures are somehow ok because we have done the best we could.
I won't lower my eyes, my expectations and hide behind this platitude.

Because we know.
When we have done the best we could.
It heats our blood
And breaks our hearts.
It grinds our bones to dust.
We know it without needing to be told.

I want to say to myself.
To you,
To anyone.
Your best isn't always going to be good enough
This is just the truth.
A plain, hard, simple truth
Written in your frozen breath on a car window.
Held in your manicured hands.
Tucked away in your bold, beating heart.
Strewn like colorful petals across ice.
Etched in sparkling frost.

Yes, you are loved and lovely
And sometimes you are good and sometimes you are kind and sometimes not.
There is enough hope here under the waning moon to encompass everything you are.
Everything you want to be.
But the best we can do and be is not always enough.

I see my refection in the mirror.
The truth of it in my eyes.
For all my reasonable, diplomatic talk,
My fear of confrontation,
I'm comfortable
Being uncomfortable.
The darkness of my eyes tells me so.

I won't run from you
But I might leave your foundations in shards
Of light and of truth.
Let's see what the new year brings...

Welcome 2016.

The Ghost in The Quiet

The work of quiet hours
Stretches on before me.
I, who could not keep you.
Who could not hold a ghost.
All smoke and mirrors.

Bare branches that claw and pull.

Drag me back to the quiet hours
Where I will be dull and sit in the dark
And stare at my own reflection
On the frosty window pane
And hear the clatter inside my head
And know it is a kind of Hell
That there is no quiet here.
That you are a spirit by my side.

Who won't let me rest.
Who won't let me alone in my quiet hours.

Looking For You

I'm in the mood for haunting.
The places I once went.
A bench. A room. A street...
Rubbing hands together in the cold night air.
Turning the coat collar up.
Dressing all in black.

I'm in the mood for contemplating
Blazing lights from pretty windows
Up and down the boulevard.
Faces at the glass
That stare blank into the night.
Reminding me how we stare
Blankly past others
Treat them as if they were ghosts
Invisible in the wake of our own light.

I'm in the mood for pretending
I am
Rootless and forgotten.
A faint trace of something that is lacking.
Insubstantial.
Left holding the fort alone.
I want to tell you
My heart might be pure but
Do not invite me in.


I'm in the mood for wandering.
Back and forth and lost.
In the mood for wishing and a million sunlit smiles.

But the night is dark and dangerous.
There is no helpless laughter.
No joyful creasing eyes...
Where are you?
Where did you go?
Are you on the bench?  Are you at the window?
Are you blazing light?  Are you insubstantial?
Am I just looking past you?  Are you all alone?

The Closing of October

I walked by an old house today.
The yard was full of trees.
The trees were full of birds.
Singing.  Glorious.  Chaotic.
And I thought how strange
That they should sing
With so much soul
So much relish
At the closing of October.

Shadow Places

Sometimes I don't want to tell you big things.
I want to drown
In the comfortable, the known, the light.
I want to shut my eyes and hide in plain sight.
I've been a ghost
And I've felt at ease in the lull.  The silence.  The no-man's land of pain.
I've gone outside and no one has seen me.
I've knocked on the glass and waited to be let in.
I've smiled and spoken
And passed through time
Lingered all the places
You once saw me.
You have a memory of a girl with a scribbled in guidebook.
A tired girl sitting on a bench along the Rhine on a cool September night.
A shadowy glimpse of a girl walking away feeling as light as the air.

Sometimes I dream of time moving backward
To city fountains and light reflecting on black water and smoky night cafes.

Forward to all the things we would never have expected in a million years.
To spirits outside the doors and in the water and black heavy skies and sudden flashes of brilliance.
Destruction and radiance all over the place.

What happened?  What went right for you?  What went wrong?

Sometimes I have nothing to say.  Nothing to tell you or anyone.

Then sometimes I want to only tell you the big things.
I lose all patience with the little things.
I want loss.
Revolution.

I want to overthrow all the gods of falseness and the little white lies we worship.
I want to leave their temples in ruins
And forget them forever.

I want to tell you something.
I've had enough of being someone
I just barely recognize.

I am going to sit and stare at the stars,
Stand on sand and listen to the ocean,
Lie on the grass like I did when I was a child
Until I recall who I am.

The Cringe Worthy Poet

Oh dear.  You see, I've been writing poetry and creative prose since I was around 13.  I can't imagine who my influences were at the time aside from the flowery, romantic British poets we learned about in English class.  I often used slightly old fashioned, ornamented phrasing  in my poems and bizarre rhyme schemes that made sense only in my head.  But I took myself and my writing quite seriously.  If you had asked me at 14 what I wanted to be I would have said a writer.  Actually I would have said a penniless writer because that is just how seriously I took it.  I didn't just want to write, I wasn't going to be a writer unless I could be some tragic obscure figure, suffering and starving for my art.  It just wouldn't be worth it otherwise.

At the age of 14, I went off to a Catholic girls boarding school and wore a uniform every day and I met writer friends.  We purposely did things that proved we were writers like dye our hair fiery red or cut it very short or wear old man's pants we found for a couple of dollars at second hand shops.  Of course these pants we only wore after school hours when it wasn't necessary to wear our navy blue kilts and crisp white shirts.  Once we even had a weekend away from the school and daringly went to a poetry reading in a smoky cafe.  We liked obscure artsy things.  To be fair though, we also did write.

This is on my mind now because I hadn't really looked at my earlier writing for years and recently decided to pull them all out and give all that brilliance a dust off.  I don't keep much but I had kept binders and journals and scribblers full of words.  In my mind, they were quite good.  In reality, as I read, I found myself blushing, cringing and laughing to myself in a mildly embarrassed way, eyes darting nervously around the room to make sure no one was there.  My first instinct was to rid my life of the evidence.  Throwing it away would be dangerous...burning it perhaps would be wiser.  But then rather fondly, I began to think what if I had never written these things at all?  There is no doubt they were very poor pieces but we have to start somewhere.  If I would never have written them then maybe I would simply have never written at all.

My point is, we need to write bad things we think are worthy and decent at the time.  They are the stepping stones that lead us forward, into the practice of writing something halfway decent, something that doesn't embarrass us and then lastly after a very long time, perhaps if we grow and learn and stretch, we write something we are truly proud of.  Nobody starts off excellent and as much as writing is a talent, it is an extremely difficult discipline as well.

So here's to hundreds of crappy poems.  They were intensely felt but poorly executed.  They have their place in my life too. 

(I am not saying I am past the cringe worthy stage anytime soon, but I am giving it a go at least!) :)

Suicide of the Young

Carefully fitting small, uneven pieces together,
A mosaic that whispers of raw secret beauty stretches in scarlet and shadow
Across the soul of the sky.
Fading into paleness, disappearing into the unacknowledged
Without so much as a hint of complaint or a cry.

You have caught the light.
Taken my laughter, peace, certainty.
All that was rightfully mine.
All I would have given you willingly,
If you had only given me time.

You have caught the light, and still, appear unmoved.
Lost in a silence so deep and resonating.
Standing draped in solitude.
But you can not be unmoved.
I can not believe you are.
Because I see the changing depth of color
Pouring from infinite skies.
I see the way it floods over you,
Seeps into you,
Then spills out of your clear eyes.

I count the passing moments.
As I will count each coming, quiet hour
Until I am able to admit to myself
That all I would die to make better for you will always be beyond my power.

Funny
How certain things become treasures -
When etched in the brilliance of loss and pain.
My heart fills and shatters with the knowledge of smiles that will never be directed my way again.

And trust.
And loyalty.
And...love.
That always simply were,
Only that the words so rarely passed my lips
That no clear echoes remain.
No tangible proof they existed
Therefore, nowhere to place any blame.

You must not have seen…
You’re beautiful.
You must not have seen…
You’re precious…

But that is because this world lacks in love and in grace.
I wish we could have protected you
Linked arms and gathered around you,
Somehow kept you in this place. 

(Written April 2005)