Preacher Woman

 

 

I become a sermon

Not so much the words and pulpit pounding

I grew up with, but I cook a piece of heaven

Pad Thai, shop and play a “you matter,”

To the check-out girl who chats and recognizes

That I remember her story, maybe she is the preacher today

I touch the old woman who dresses in wild colorful

Clothes and sits across from Trader Joes, I wake her

Gently and place a twenty in her hands, walk across

Get a red cart, look up and she is waving, though she

Has never spoken a word to me in my several weeks

Of saying here you go or merry Christmas or hope you like it

I empty the dishwasher for the millionth time, not my job

In the house of cards where I live but I say all right, I still love you

Though you dirty everything and never help, like the

Sun I’ll keep shining here but I’m writing too in my room

While the drama goes on out there, my sermon to myself

Today, listen, keep on when every distraction threatens

Your real work, keep listening and pounding these keys.

 

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A Longing for Trees and Brooks and Stones

 

 

i’m an old woman

often angry at the state of affairs

preferring admittedly love affairs

waning my life with whining

i think of Shakespeare’s “Now is the

winter of our discontent,” as if he knew

of this time in my life

 

and perhaps he also knew the heart of this old

crank of Woodland Hills, California

 who also has lived by and longs for his other words:

“And this, our life, exempt from public haunt,

finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

 

 

The Peach and the Pair…Ten Years and Counting

for Micah

 

loving long term is such another

animal its not the erotic grip

that addicts us to pleasure

and got us here,

but the long slow lick that

sometimes gathers all the tastes

the bitters the sweets salty

savory how the memories

accumulate to form a soft

bed for times of extreme

exhaustion love muscles

strained beyond burn

learning what even old

people just don’t know yet

every inch of each other’s

body but more the mystery

of always new discoveries

her new breath, the way

her beauty opens like

never before or her

broken heart bleeds in

your open hands and rips

a hole in your selfish yearnings

you can’t run in this race

it’s a steady walk hardening

the weak places and softening

the hard barriers leaking joy

all the way so that really

more than walking this

is a dancing journey

two souls in such

raw recognition bound

only by knowing that

past these separate unyielding

identities, there is only One

Are you feeling stuck wishing you were in France just traveling for a while. Check out these two amazing friends of mine, Lukie who is Brazilian and her husband Martin, who is English. They are in a motor home traveling the back roads of France. At least you can pretend.

She Comes Undone

How the land bends toward her humans
Falling she comes undone
Lets her hair down in the rain opens
Her body, comes, clean and fertile
Spills her seed in grand abandon
Hides quiet and pregnant in winter
Waiting calling for peace
Laughing her joy in spring in a thousand
Thundering babies given for us and for
All of her loved ones, though we cut
Her heart out and bomb her womb
Still she finds a way to give

Eyesight

 

 

 

First light bask in the oneness

Feel my tongue. Is there something to say

Drink in the silence of a wildly raucous household still asleep

Turn into a prayer breathing to adjust my sight

Self  preoccupied groaning let’s go of my pajamas

 Cartooned thoughts pop telling me that there is work to do

And play to make grandsons to love and homeless

People to feed, poems to write, Thai barbecue chicken

To create, or is it poems to create, homeless people to

Love and grandsons to feed?  Hanging upside-down skews the picture.