posted January 13, 2001 12:09 AM         

We are surrounded by great-grandfathers
Etched in wood and moss
They stand around us guarding, protecting,
whispering words unknown
except through the breeze
and by spiders weaving through the trees,
their traveling windy lives.
It is a day where the sky
blends in with leaves
And we blend in with dirt
So there is no telling
who we are as skin and blood and veins.
We are the sticks born from
grandfather oaks
We are the songs born
from a bird's belly
We are their wings flapping
from tree to tree
from we to me
We are surrounding each other.
************************************
SOUND(BEAMING)FORWARD

Sitting in black belly night
a skeleton leaf tickles
my skin like the stir
of an eyelash

A gingko whispers age-old secrets
to the emerging butterfly
as the willows wave in the distance.

Hush in fire wind
to the moon I listen:

"It's time to open your eyes"

I think, perhaps, she is right
that the light might bend back
to me.
************************************
WHAT'S IMPORTANT

I remember being back to square one
being empty and barely touched by grace
by poetic inspiration like grass touching
skin; I am wanting to be a child again.

Wanting that tree they tore down back
wanting that sun-scorched metal slide
to singe the undersides of my thighs
and that skinned knee from leaning too far

over the handlebars. I didn't care how I
looked in bathing suits or how my heart
would break that day,
only how my cat left a warm nest in

my lap as she slept. When you lay in grass
eye-level to the blades, you have the
perspective of an ant. I can fall asleep
in this grass and wake up in

twenty years and I'll still hate change even
with these seasons gone by. But what's important is the smell of dirt warmed by
the sun to an old woman whose face is
resting on her palm.
****************************************
THANK YOU, MAY SARTON

Praise the book of a woman to ease me into
stasis, to an understanding of my own mind
through a sixty year old's...praise the shirt
that smells like me when I was good and happy, praise me finally letting my mother touch me after twenty years...praise my back to him...praise the rose petals from that night resting in an empty tea bottle...praise the words that fly out my mouth like feathers...praise the moment I first wanted to write and give birth to something graet...praise me changing my hair color...praise the Uileann pipes that take me back to a life I don't remember but am sure I lived...praise the future I think I know as I open my eyes and see the first moments of dawn sneak in my room, the first douse of orange like how it looks to a bear at the zoo when all the people go home.
*************************************

***from the yet-to-be-but-soon-to-hopefully-be-published-collection, "Sound(Beaming)Forward".

posted January 13, 2001 12:29 AM         

PLEASE RESERVE A COPY OF YOUR BOOK FOR ME!

You have a gift, LMB

posted January 14, 2001 01:04 AM         

I am so envious of you (and Goober). I wish I could write like that. You are both very Blessed.

posted July 04, 2001 05:57 PM         

you deserve it

~Princess