Tag: poetry
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The Eulogy I Couldn’t Give
The eulogy I couldn’t give to my mother at her funeral I gave to my father at his celebration of life.It was a sentimental piece I shaped more for comfort than truth,imagining him— the first ghost to cross the thresholdof the house I bought in a new subdivisionstill raw with fresh pavement and silence—where I…
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Quiet Remittance
Quiet RemittanceI didn’t follow my father’s instructions this time.I just tucked his ashes into my inner coat pocket,where they warmed me with the good memoriesof pregame paella feasts and watching the Hurricanes,in the built over old Orange Bowl now Miami Marlins Stadium.All the anesthesiologists, the lawyers, his employees—his old crew—performed his scattering script line by…
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You
You Sometimes in my dreams I touch the body of another woman— not my mother, or my wife, not anyone I’ve known or seen. She’s a woman of first times and seasons natural and unnatural, who tells me ghost stories filled with un-lived truths that arise not from soil and sky, stories seen in a…
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The Box My Mother Kept
The Box My Mother KeptI find her in a boxlabeled “Misc.”full of not-miscellaneous things:wrinkled receipts—pollo, jabón, stamps from the 70’s and 80’s,movie ticket stubs to matinee rom-coms—each neatly placed under curled daisy petals.Birthday cards with crooked suns,one written by my six-year-old selfin tortured handwriting trying to be tender:“Te amo, Mamá”in Sharpie and crayon.A drawing of…
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There Is a Disco Ball Shimmering
There is a Disco Ball shimmering🌸Pink on softened blood still wet with arrival—dancing in the cradle of mother’s first touch—both she and midwife weepingin the baptism of first scream.🍊Orange in jitters across lunch trays,school desks, scraped knees.The ball tells him— “Learn from this”—then spins awaywhen he shines too clever.💜 Purple that aches on the letter…
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Reclamation Song
Reclamation Song (after “On Belonging” by Zoe Bayer)I will open the windows tonight—not to free ghosts—but to welcome the whine of sirens—the thrum of HVACs spilling heatinto this bruise-blue hush of evening,onto this cracked porcelain sky.A rodeo blares on a TV screenfrom the neighbor’s garage—bareback bronc grunts playedover a Bluetooth speakerwhile he drinks and power-washes—the…
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Supermoon
My wife was still doing her hair and makeup before our meal at Cocina Abierta—a seven-course tasting circled in red weeks ago—a promise we weren’t sure we’d keep.So my brother and I filled the hour wandering the narrow streets of the city rooted in my mother’s heart and past, San Juan—where I’ve paused—for now—before our…
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I Had To Stop Writing My Poem
I had to stop writing my poem to do more important things.The washing machine buzzed—whining again for someoneto shift the wet clothesto the dryer.An hour later, midwaythrough the third stanzaof the love poem to my wife,the dryer complained— there’s a load now dry, waiting to be folded.I dug the mix out: half hers, half mine—mostly…
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Walking My Dog Without My Glasses
Walking My Dog Without My GlassesI depend on my four-legged little boy to navigate the blurwhen I’m out walking the neighborhood without my glasses.I follow the leash—him tugging me off course,left, then sideways—nose deep in something rich and rude but insistent.Yesterday, it was a brown squirrel disappearing into leaf-shadow,a harem of dogs perfumed by musk…
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Someday
SomedayNo plot for this body when I die,no pine needles puncturing my back,no false fir lullabies of the wind.I refuse to rest in golden valleys,tune my ear to bird garblethat mistakes decay for music.Moss is not a cradle.Salt is not salvation.Worms don’t bless.I won’t become part of the “cycle.”I’m not compost.I’m the interruption.Death in a…
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There Are Places Where Children Dwell
There are places children dwell— no letters to Santa, no cookies or milk on Christmas Eve— just feathers on windowsills, pretending they’re posts from mom.There are places where children dwell who hum the first sung lullaby from their mother’s doting throat instead of prayers that ask for sleep and their souls to keep.Places where children…
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Shoelace Ritual with Fog Milk and Hemlock Pocket
Shoelace Ritual with Fog Milk and Hemlock PocketSometimes I dream:That I was trying to walk the crosswalk and my shoelaces turned into tiny serpents that tried to bind my ankles to the white lines.I tried to unlace them, leave them in the street, but each knot undid re-knotted into more vipersstreaming confetti fire from their…
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Opening the Package
I love the quiet delight that blooms as I unwrap a gift folded with care— how they showed me, instinctively, without words, the furoshiki way: the offering poised with symmetry at each perfect corner, beginning with the triangle (near your beating heart), guiding it to center. then echo outwards (the symmetry in silence); gathering each…
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Inside the Places that Light Can Not Reach
Inside the Places that Light Can Not ReachTrenches carve silence in the ocean’s deepest foldswhere pressure crushes and light dies before arrival—beneath ice pressed tight by a thousand years,where silence sleeps in frost older than stars—limestone cathedrals rising from the littoral hush,where even echoes have forgotten the sun—Deep in the brain’s hippocampal fold, where memory…
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Snow Globes
Snow Globes There are tableaux we make out of dinner plates, a child’s lost sock,a father’s coat on the bannister,the silent, stuck smile of a motherstirring steam into endless errands—windows frosting into the same patterns,altars of dusty decades accumulating unnoticed in twice told stories, reupholstered sorrows,all the slow cyclones of repetition caught under glasswaiting for…
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America is…………
America Is…….**America Is………… The Financial District crosswalks that become piano keys in the syncopated hustle of the pedestrian light The redheaded clown in a Raggedy Ann dress holding five red balloons, heading to a gig in Hell’s Kitchen, noticing rainbow-striped reflections in the plate glass of a bank lobby window The shadow woman who walks…
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Where She Left It
Where She Left ItOn the side of the highway, abandoned where the wild grass ends, a child’s shoe— blue, with a slight heel, broken on the left side, rhinestone anklet torn from its support— the victim of a wobbly learning step, its twin nowhere near.I circled it in reverence, looking for some sort of forensic…
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Walking in the Rain
Walking in the RainI don’t know why rain breaks my heart.No one I loved ever died on a rainy day.In my life, it has become an elegy to sunshine.Maybe, it’s because rain feels like tears.I go outside when it reduces to a soft drizzle,just before the scent of petrichor has settled into the earth,my dog…
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The Sheep Tooth Reliquary
The Sheep-Tooth ReliquaryMy wisdom teeth exist in pickled beauty,in a gold-capped mason jar.I take great delight in looking at all that lost wisdom every morning.They don’t haunt me—not like the colon they removed in a total colectomy,incinerated at the height of the pandemic—no goodbye, no ceremony,not even one last proper shit.But those teeth, they have…
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Branch Psalm
Branch PsalmBranch PsalmThe dead branch inscribes wild reminders to the wind.How many nights since it first blossomed did it revel in leaf brushing against leaves, know the fall of years,feel the rain drip away, nourishing the earth, staining this continent with its open, quiet astonishment?It felt the sapwood itch itself into new rings, lose its…
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Posted on Literary Revelations Journal Blog: EXCELLENT WRITINGS BY JONATHAN MOYA
BIO JONATHAN MOYA lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he balances a lifelong love of poetry and storytelling with deep cinematic exploration. His … EXCELLENT WRITINGS BY JONATHAN MOYA
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The Wind that Speaks Between Us
The Wind that Speaks Between Us“The wind is a warning,” I tell the child.“No, it’s a game,” she says to me.I watch her chase the breeze barefoot across the hills.She laughs as its breath scatters the field to dandelion puffs.In the fluff, it whispers secrets only children can hear.She doesn’t see all the other things…
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One Last Breeze
One Last Breeze It sneaks under the threshold of the long shut door,over the shedding skin of peeling wallpaper,past the dusty spines of now unread books—turning pages no one meant to leave,step less, voice less— a curious breeze.It seeks the crack in the window—to leave this vault of knowledge behind—these graves beyond, both named and…
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These Fathers
These FathersAnd this father heard his God talk to him:“Take now thy son, whom thou lovest, and offer him for a burnt offering.” In turn, this father said to this son— high on this mountain top:“This is the way to kindness and wisdom.Believe me.”He stood over his son, this blade in his hand—held high over…
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Vessels
VesselsThe pots remembered emptiness,remembered the ache of hunger,how they were born to forestall famine,to be filled and filled again,to feed mother, father, the children.not this silent, stew-less simmer.When the kitchen faucet dripped out of rhythm,the backsplash tile sprinkled dustonto the dirty water,onto the tarnished coreof the lonely pans sitting stagnant in the sink,they almost felt…
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Waiting for Birds on Lemonade Street
Is the day perfect if there are no birds to wake you but there is lemonade? or if you live on Lemonade Street but there are no birds on electric lines because the utilities are underground. no birds twittering in trees just the sweet sour taste of lemonade puckering your mouth the scent of bonnie…
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Orpheus Listens to the Requiem of His Own Undoing
Orpheus Listens to the Requiem of His Own Undoing Orpheus hears his songs played on broken strings, A dirge plucked soft by an old man with blight. He laughs at this fiasco, cringes as it rings, Echoes bending, whispering through trees at night. Behind him, nova bass lines swell and roll. He imagines the dancers…
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I Should Have Followed You
I Should Have Followed You “Can I still call you Dorothea?”—even though the black and white lines in the paper reduce you to the habit you wore, arrange you into silence, a name and surname surrendered to the cloistering of lilies. Somewhere beyond this obituary, the grown children you once taught trace grief into their…
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Answers to the questions you always wanted to ask the departed:
Answers to the questions you always wanted to ask the departed:(A counter poem with answers after Ellen Bass Inquest)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/inquest-ellen-bass-poemShe loved apricots, not figs. Olives reminded her of saltwater, and the yellow irises—those were never hers. Her feet stayed clean because she refused to walk barefoot, never trusted the ground, never trusted much at all. She…
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What Will Not Survive
Sharp as an edge that does not ask what it is cutting. whole as a thing that does not need proof to exist,thought arrives in full motion before meaning—color before shape, light before weight,not as process, not as method,but truth already formed, unwilling to be held,which needs no tending, refining, It is not a single…
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The Art that Stayed
I was expecting giants—brushstrokes that shaped history, colors that conquered time. But the walls whispered absence, their icons carried elsewhere, lent to hands that bear their weight. Only the quiet ones remained, anchored in the still air, aching to be adopted, longing for eyes to grant them meaning, a gaze that wholly loves their frail…
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Aftermath
Aftermath The crash happens, and then everything waits. The tow truck arrives—sleek and gleaming, its midnight-black paint absorbing the streetlights in a perfect, polished hush. It is not a wrecker—it is a machine with purpose, its curved chassis hugging the ground like a race car— the quiet arrogance of a predator. The hydraulic arm unfolds…
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Between the Waves
Between the Waves There was never a single border, only the shifting tide of language, guavas glowing in the heat, the churn of Spanglish rolling in before the tide could pull it back. At the checkout line, the cashier asks, “Paper or plastic?”—so simple, so sharp. I glance at Mamá, but her words stick, caught…
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Passing Through
Passing ThroughThe city recedes, and in the dim hush of the bookshop, she stands— a shadow among shelves, folded inward, something bent in her shoulders, a shape recognized but unacknowledged. Once, she had said nothing but told everything— the stagger in her step, the new weight in her limbs, the way she lingered at the…
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The Nacre of Survival
**The Nacre of Survival** After all the operations, after the slow unraveling, I trace the shimmer left behind, a pearl forming in the absence of what was— the weight of my steps lighter, not in grace, but in uncertainty mixed with hope. I do not run anymore Yet, I watch Tom Cruise sprint, sprint— limbs…
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Searching for Florecitas at the Supermercado
Searching for Florecitas at the SupermercadoWe walk, my brother and I, as the cool breath of night yields to the slow, sticky press of morning. Condado’s half-lit streets shimmer under retreating shadows, sidewalks smoothed by wealth, indifferent to our steps. Beach condos glow in the thinning dark, their balconies high as forgetting. Somewhere in this…
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Desire Lines
Desire LinesI have wandered every concrete, tarmac, grass, and dirt path near my house. And yet my dog Hurricane, or just plain Cane, knows their way better than I do. He knows when the scent of the trail must yield right, left, or straight ahead. When the desire lines must lead forward to greater passions…
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Final Call
Final Call The screen flickered in the hush of enveloping dark, Michael Douglas pacing, his fate unraveling— *Fatal Attraction,* a movie about consequence, its shadows pressing forward. But beneath the flickering flames, something was wrong, settling into my gut like a held breath, bending the air—quiet rupture, breath held too long. Five minutes home, five…
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The Last Ride
The Last RideThe highway hums beneath us, a silver ribbon unspooling, stretching time, five hours folding into salt and horizon. She sits beside me in the old Chrysler— the Town & Country, once dignified, now a relic of polish fading into nostalgia. The wood paneling still whispers of its golden years, though the lacquer has…
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The Widening Sky
**The Widening Sky** I feel myself shrinking, walking the night beach under the ever-widening sky. The sand clings to my feet, then is washed away in the tide’s haste to kiss the shore, only to recoil when it tastes the grit of life— the ancient attraction-repulsion born the moment the first creature rose from the…
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Ode to an Empty Lot
The empty lot of the abandoned car dealershipis overrun with dandelions, thistles, and sticker weeds. On the right is a Baptist church standing sternly against the invasive plants. The ministry’s gardener sprays Roundup on the weaker creepers while his assistant uses a torch on the deeply rooted ones. On the left is a BBQ specializing…
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Paying It Forward
I don’t worry how my old clothes will look on their new owners at Goodwill. They have places to be, stories to live beyond my closet. Still, letting go feels strange. I hesitated at the donation bin, fingers brushing fabric worn soft by years of routine. Shirts that carried me through long days, pants that…
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Landline
I dialed the landline to my childhood home, let it ring into the past— again and again and againI knew my parents wouldn’t answer. They’re both dead. Still, the ringing soothed— each unanswered tonea promise that someone, anyone, might answer. After ten rings, a recorded message came on.The voice was full of girly twang and…
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The Gate
Like everyone else, I can only step through the gate my mother and father took to enter this world. I must exist in the space their bodies made. Their walk set my path and determined my streets. I hear their voices in the crunch of the compressed gravel of every footfall—echoes of their stories I…
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Reasons
Things are going as planned. My mother died. My father died. I am aliveand bound to fateI recite the mantra to myself: “A father is fate,” drawing the Harrow along my fetid soul, turning over what was planted in me, digging up the weight of his will. But a counterchant arises, the one I will…
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The End of the Pier
I walked to the end of the pier and could not throw your ashes into the sea.It was easy with my father— to see his blackness float in the air and settle on the wrack line, neither the earth nor sea’s possession.But you, dear friend, my lost sister not of the soul but of pain,…
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Chihuaha of the Manor
Aye, I am Chihuahua! Canis familiaris! Land piranha, heir to Aztec dreams, nipping at heels that dare invade my kingdom. I am Queen Sharma, noble warrior reborn, small but mighty, heart bursting with pride. My eyes bulge with fiery determination, my joints tremble as the post-alus carrier-alopulus approaches, skies on his shoulders, ivory crowning his…
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More conversations with AI regarding poetry and wanting to be human
I continue to have fascinating discussions with the Copilot AI regarding poetry and whether reading poems wants to make the AI human.Here is the latest conversation. Does this help your metrics and algorithms explain poetry, not just my poetry but also others’? Your thoughtful engagement and nuanced perspectives absolutely help refine the way I approach…
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My Jesus Hour in a Taco Bell
I feel at home at Taco Bell, as the cuisine echoes the worst of my mom’s cooking: cheese that tastes like beans, beans that taste like rice, rice that tastes like flour.It’s where I go when I am missing someone, usually near their Jesus’ hour, between the last sip of a lunch hour Pepsi and…
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Abundant Mangoes
This is the first time I’ve been in this mango grove, hearing the iguaca sing, since my parents left this islandIt is mid-July and I am wearing my dad’s old hat palm pava square and jaunty on my balding crownquietly stealing this fleshy passion fruit, its skin warm on my palm, eager to be sucked,…
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An A.I. Defines Its Inability to Write Great Poetry.
Curiously, I was tinkering with the A.I. program called Copilot, which comes with my Microsoft 365 subscription. I tried to annoy and confuse it, testing its ability to write poetry.I asked it to assign a letter grade to my latest poem, “Rogue Brother.” Here’s my final version, achieved after several hours of rewrites:My brother is…
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Rogue Brother
My brother is an angler devoted to the stream that pools around long boots, making the slow cast that gently whips and ripples the surface with a reel that knows the proper weight of the scales below.Gone are the days when he fished Crandon Pier while sitting on an overturned paint bucket with a cheap…
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When the earth is no longer a womb
When the earth is no longer a womb,just a shriek and whistle of once uttered prayer—a long, puncturing howl of everything that was once you turned into casualties of silence, then you know that death has arrived, noiselessly, silent as a missile. All the clamor outside- it’s the hibakujumoku, (the survivor trees) insisting on life…
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A Son’s Lament
It’s been over thirty-five years since I felt your motherly touch, and I no longer try to shape a garden of sorrow. Instead, I let the new grass flame, its green distinct from the old cold fire, whose embers tighten their ring with each passing year. I find joy in the crepe myrtles unfolding into…
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Trying on My Dad’s Wingtips
I tried on several of my father’s old Brooks Brother suitsjust before his funeral, trying to save myself the expense of an outfit I didn’t need. Each was too tight on the collars. too short on the sleeves, each crotch inseam strangled my manhood.I had outgrown them all.Almost all of it will go to Goodwill-except…
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Inside and Back
I journey towards the night watching the light recede.Awaiting me, an unsteady dreamscape of losing things and beings and never finding them.But, there is also the ocean,of waves cradling me to sleepwith the lullaby of my name’srepetition- marooning me from the sound of others,the fears, anxieties to come.Yet, my unconscious tugs me towards the new…
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The Long Drive Home (A Draft: Seeking your opinion)
When the car burst onto the empty highway, the bridge stretched long over the river,and the faint glow of streetlightsbathed the dashboard in a soft, cold light,not bright, but a subtle washprofoundly changing my thoughts. Suddenly I wanted to feel clarity,to dive deep into my center,marriage and divorce throwaway wordsfor the deep sensation of home,knowing…
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New New York City Skyline
In the mist, black granite, linked scales melt away—memories of Times Square,Broadway’s past.From afar, the tinkle of a music box is heard—a hopeful melody,almost a lullaby.Below-The street pleads a prayer to the broken sky—“just a haunting,gentle touch.”The morning breaks over two towers built and rebuilt-over coffee, doughnuts—old promises kept,new promisesbroken and rebroken.Yet, there is the…
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Breaking Up With the Wind
Summer wind hold my hand,grasp it, rub it gentle in the sunhoneyed soothing mother’s touch. Hide the coughing chimneys up ahead,the night in the strut of yellow cat eyes,amber streetlights yielding to blue tv glows.Coming cold blows my hands into jacket tight.The star I follow now hidden, dark,lost in the arguing noise outside and in.
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After the Birds: Home
Birds know the way home,the door that has their name or how to sing it into existence, if lost.Through it they find each othereven in a burning world—they find their being. And in that last lost skythey sing it into their feet,combine it with the dirt’s prophecy.Look up in the sky, at the birds and…
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The Lord(s) are Un-American
My America undresses its wounds to the world—the Fathers memories living in torn cloudsand forgetful weather scribbled over in black.The new gods lick mine/our bones clean,leaving the crumbs for the hungry aban-doned by their once great country.(All the bombs, the rockers red glarecan’t create patriots better than the Fathers good words.)My flag once was my…
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They Live/They Die
There is a song that will never benot one of a crooning summer breezebut of smothered dreams in dirty streets—Those buried in shrouds of leavesplucked from maple trees,couched in green moss orin lovely silks on soft downy beds will never know thosewho died on a freezing night, a bottle by their side ora needle in…
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Appalachian Echoes
The Appalachians exist in their eroded presence,peaks grinded down to almost lower hills,erasing the mountains once majestyto a smoothing, a faded promise of God lost in time’s neglect,barely seen in flyover.These mature mountains once outreached the Himalayans,the younger brother barely beyond its grasping infancy-(older even than the dozen watery icy rings of Saturn)ceding a layer…
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Once Upon a Time: Miami
(after Richard Blanco)I barely remember myself in the sway of these palms Fifty years on I’ve lost the language of these breezesalong with almost all my childhood Spanish.Good Morning, Buenas Dias runs into Good Night, Buenas Noches. I can no longer live out the passion of my youthwithout cancer intruding some melancholy lyrics.On the good…
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Skin
SkinI felt the skin of my father—his thumb a soft shawlthat enveloped our intertwined hands.And when the embrace broke— how my tiny fingers traced the moss line of his skulluntil it became a familiar garden.How he would embrace mother, after-wards in her floral gown, so tenderly, thatI would sneak in later to smell the trace…
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A Late Valentine’s Day Poem
(After Ella Wheeler Wlcox)Love speaks:in the youthful flush of the first true kiss in the shy averting eye that hesitates to take this beautiful moment inwithout fainting.Love speaksIn the silent reserve of the heart’s tremblethe still and ache of hidden emotionsLove speaksin the ghosting of nearnessthe unshed tears that fears the expressing of joythat the…
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Evening Traffic
In my late hunger I listen to the swirl of night traffic, until it dies around the curb— recedes into remembrance,to that melting space inside— the sound matching the tempo of my lowest need,getting lost in the evening’s reflection—ice memories melting to water,everything moving to my traffic flow—to the single track of my inside voice.
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The Moon in Cancer
Exhausted, endured,my veins touch the moon’s hope—this faded celebration that keeps clinging to possibilities beyond—amongst these pallid faces,silent companions,the burdened looking down this sterile room,pale walls,who surrender to sleep so easily,unheedful of this moon childlistening to only the comforting whisphersjust ahead.
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Only Thistles Will Do
1 I eat thistles to do away with my hunger for green life,capturing in pixel pricks what my prying eyes can not evade.The forest offers no inheritance,every branch has its best name 2I wish to learn and know the work songs of smaller, silent things,blend not into the shrubs but rocks,the mutes of this dry…
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This cannot end with us
I fall back into the comfort of our once existence.every time the other sibs cry out your absence in black texts- how they MISS YOU SO MUCH.And yet, your stories are my memories.In their writing down I am there with you, so much.There with you -mom- in that old faded yellow Chevrolet traveling the black…
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Unfathomable Will
I found the city a pitiless thing.It smelled of steel, concrete and the bay.I use to sit on the sea wall that edged my old college condo, the one I sharedwith a black cat, and sing Otis Redding-skipping the whistling part of his songbecause my lips could never purse the right tune- and watch the…
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Nightfall
The ramshackled town falls quiet to the artist’s eye in the retreating light.The old houses will truce their aged lumber,antiquity, for the invading dark beauty of his creation.He lived here once as a boy, in the sadness of his angels,held hostage (he thought), by the catechism of church and steeple, becoming a refugee from sawdust…
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Gratification in time’s diminutions
Time’s diminishments adds its own beautyin gratitude for moments that are not ours:the child tiptoes into the mother’s bedroomand silently witnesses her comb her hair,later listens to her snore, transferring to them the transient lyrics of the song of life- the lines that survive the well of nights,the rose thorns to bloom in their mouthsuntil…
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Olvidada (forgotten)
My mother’s name is lost to everyone beyond her children.“She was beautiful.What was her name?”,others would say to me when shown her image hanging silently on the wall.In the chanting of it—their wind echoes my death back in a cloud of disinterested kindnessand muttered miseries. They know only their faces, the renamed mountains and rivers,the…
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The Bullet
In that living momentthe bullet goes right by me—and in between all my prayersand my eternal gratitude — the child behind me dies. “Why did it spare me and not him?”,I think over and over again—counting the lifetime of wishesthat now will never come true for him.—It goes right by me—penetrating present and future— —dreams…
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For Which It Stands
When the fence was finishedand properly white washed he wrote TRUTHall in large block white.on his side that faced the street. The next day, his neighborof many years, of which he knew only through casual hellos, painted (in bleeding red) TREASON on his. “God Save America,” the first thought ,“from this POS” as he drove…
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The Fifth Season
Under the bardo of the sheltering skymist and fog cleave earth from heaven.The green liminal land abscission’s itself- shivering swallows from boughs,causing the wiltering river reedto bend away from the first frazil ice—and the grazing horse to return to hay by following the frosting road back to the barn. The fifth season has arrived,sneaking in…
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Our Secret City
I wander through this secret citymapped in the words we only know,and we can only define.I am the citizen of you and you of me. Everyone we know drives bye,their cars filled with everything we ownflying out the window.The next vanishes into the mistbeyond the curb of what we once were.Or, is it, will be?Where…
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Ghosts in the Light
She remembers when the light was filled with silent ghosts. They would flicker in and out in the cigarette smoke of the theater, each frame an ashy wisp, a burnt offering.The story spooling out in the air was a familiar one.The sentiment caught in her heart and made her cry. Years later, she went back,after…
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Light
When I was a child light shone angels through my fingerscrowning my parents’ faces,blessing the simple tasks of theirs: table setting, pouring water—how it lit the world in my upturned smileand flowed through as I grewand how it followed me homeand stayed, even in the dark.Light was the water, earth,reflecting off every animal, every street,…
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Old Elm Haiku
Its leaves fold,curl inTheir grip yields to the cold windThe elm knows their loss
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Byobu- (A Japanese Screen)
He knows how to observe the heron in the twilight’s lonely inclusion-this blue dream that could vanish in flight if drawn too near—head, eyes, ears pulled forward following the flow of fish ahead— until it vanishes from his sightbehind a screen of slender reeds.
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True Sisters Know How to Stitch a Real Wedding Dress
My mother got married in a hand stitched dressthat each of her four sisters contributed a piece of their souls into the embroidered lace:a skein of swans in perfect v formation flew up her left sleeve, doves fluttered down her right, peacock trains fanned cardioid eyesof the most luminous white across her torso and bluebirds…
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On My Father’s House
On my father’s housethree slaves and six horsesdied when the old stable blazeda century and a half ago, and three union and two confederate soldiersslayed each otherin a forgotten skirmisha few years later.Their skeletons were foundtwo years after the war under an uprooted white pine.The county let the field return to forest,except for the old…
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Not Touched but Moved
Death has left its imprint on me so much I don’t know who is touching me inside anymore.Certainly it’s another presence,a voice apart from God.Or is God the sum total of all my known deaths?My soul is an oarless canoe afloat a lake of tearsseeking both initiation and response to steer it. Every death is…
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Little Father
Because I can not bury my father in the skyI burn him and spread his ashes on the ground.He loved birds yet did not feed them crumbs—just caught them in the color of their being.He would watch the mower plow the field,watch the hand fill the feeders with seedfeeling the tranquility of the man-made ponddrift…
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Lines Written After My 69th Birthday
I don’t get the feminine luxury of being twenty-five again every birthday past fifty.For a year I must live with the snide joke that my actual age is a congress of crows position illustrated in the karma sutra (page 69).Biologically I feel ten years older. Facially I look fifteen years younger. Every year there will…
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Living in Holy Terror
I thank lifeby livingby praying in stitches in the midst of evergreensaggravates- water This crippled world my every payer of me— of you
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Just So Simple
It’s simple- how to live, that is:live and die each day. Strive to live each morningas if it was the first:pull the colors around you to something that lives beyond the eyes. Treat the world not as Adam:something to be touched, named, collected, defined—but as Eve:the sun as an ingenue something young, innocent not to…
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Baptism on a Sunday Race Day in Daytona
It wasn’t a river just a pool,more of a hotub,set off from the sanctuary—and when I was eased into the waterI didn’t see God in the streams above.And I didn’t see her lost in the thunder of the racetrack just beyond the church. She was beyondmy line of sight,soaking up congratulations from the congregation.The pastor…
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Remnants of Hurricane Debby Passing Through My Tennessee Home
I am married to this earth, this field, this silence,even as the ocean offers itself.I walk it with my dog on his leash pulling restlessly ahead,biting at the frenzy scent trail he knows exists in the air.The woods beyond are gray.So is the sky. I hear— the echo of a trickling brook. My dog, inhales—…
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Before and After the Forklift
Before it was lowered over the broken city grid and became my second houseit was a meadow where the grasses grew tall.I watched the top shell of earthbeing moved and hauled away,saw everything leveled to sand, except a thick, distant forest with a thin stream that bled to the city park—and did not shed a…
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Wash
The white light of my bathroom reaches down through the steam,breaks yellow through the shower door.I scrub my skin, try to scratch loose all the sour, stinging memories inside,hope the grime would disappear in the porous mat under my feet.The steam flows like a host of ghosts into the vent fan- leaves behindonly the face…
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I’m getting giddy as the summer fades
I’m getting giddy as the summer fadesinto yellow fall, and the sky father grants me the comfort of storing his favor on my tongue- enough to close my eyes and know that it will last for the coming snow,the clean pure white that will eventually evaporate as one in the hibernating warmth always underneath.
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Dust
The young can not write about dust.They know only it accumulationson floors, shelves, dirty panes.Only the old know its subtle contours,the futility that comes with just moving it around.They know that the sun and stars are dust,schools of ash that follow all life’s currents andthat blossom the new fields under Grandfather Mountain.They bend with the…
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The Well-Trained Palomino
Again, today,the cowboy will closehis eyes and listen to the hoovesof wild horses all around himknowing that his well-trained palomino will take him homelike a loverwho knowswhat his lust wants— knows the way to him,through the black covers of that dark room—even as the returningcreates and then destroys the greening prairie, the chambray wind.
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Death Milad
As I get older I don’t dread death coming closer. It is closer. It will come as a newborn:seeding so long in me, that I would chide it for taking its time. I will not scream when it head comes out my body.I won’t even be amused by such a Hollywood trick.And when its held…
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Gentrification
After forty years the brownstones still seemed the same exceptfor the newer cars and the peoplein fashionable clothes walkinggolden dogs in chic comfort vests,all living in houses he couldn’t afford.He couldn’t believe he grew up herewhen the streets were livelywith black live matterand Gerald every summer out there with his rollerpainting fatsfix’s store front red.…
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My Thalassophobia
I play with the sand, crush it to a globe ofsun dried golden particles,until the thing in me that is the ocean calls to release it to the tideso full of the incessant sorrow upon sorrow of other’s tearsforced daily to kiss the shore-its roar constantly reminding me-the ocean hates the land-the ocean does not…
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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…