Tag: children
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Assembling the Crib
He lacked the skill to make it true, the crib, so he assembled it from a wordless diagram,an ark of 5 panels, 32 screws and bolts, 3 tools-tightening it just enough, until the memory of its creation fixed solid in his soul, well past the 1000 days of the child dreaming in it, the 30…
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My mother use to say….
My mother use to say whenever I gave I her one of my poems to critique-my mother whose grace and beauty lingers like the reflection of sun on water-that my words remind her of the time in her youth when her life was honey.But I am not a bee and she was never a queen—…
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Well of Souls
(after William Erickson)The well sings of all the fallen children.The song is sad and long for there are many,but it’s also beautiful, for the children sing to the din of stars above.It’s the song of the echo of love, a song that grows, low and soft and secretbuilding a staircase to the heavensthat rises above…
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The Fruit
The apple trees emerge from winter sleepcascades of pink-white blooming bright starsbecoming eye memories for the kitchen child eating cherries with cream amidst the cooking spring lamb, the figs, fresh peas, mint As the trees put on their leaves, add yet another ringthe mother puts on the ghost grandmother’s coatfilled with blue-veined memories of the…
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Circuses Go Round and Round
On days when the girls were circusestheir mother would parade them in the dusky living room where the overhead spotswould highlight each one in their own three ring aura, The Entrance of the Gladiators stuck on repeat on the old phonograph, brass and woodwinds bouncing lithely off their bodies and trumpeting off the walls,the humid…
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A Prayer for Beloved Mothers
Beloved, mother this day you will eat, in this body of trying, the bread of hope. Beloved, mother this day you will bathe, amidst this body of breaths, in the fragrance of rose water. Beloved, mother this day you will hear, inside this sounding body, the soft laughter of your children. Beloved, mother this night…
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Putting Marbles Away
Oh, I wish I could hear the sound of marblesbut my world exists in silence and sight. So I watch my Grandkids collide and scatterthem on the old wooden floorboards.When I put them in their jar, I delight in their smoothness and coolness.They form layers of iridescent swirls, rainbows that light up my worn world.
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Going Up the Stairs She Heard
She heard her children going slowly up the stairs of the old grand house draped in linen solitude. On the peacock treadsthey chanted discoveries,whispered mysteries she intimately knew.
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Fold It Away, My Child
Good mothers make their children fold and put away all clothes, even hers after death. Bad mothers make sure they always wear them for the rest of their lives.