Electric

To a group, who at one time would have flickered recognition.

Electric

How do I mourn you
When I refuse to believe you are dead
How do I stop remembering
The things you said
About me
As a person, a woman, a poet
How do I leave it behind

How do I stop wishing you back
Do I give up
Do I swallow hard and pack it in
Ditch the verse and grab my purse
And go
I wish I could know

Is it better to remember
And try to smile
Realize it was good for a while
Like a lover whose face I can't forget
Farewell, my dear, I'm glad you let
Me in for a time

Oh, I could probably try
To recreate you, reconstruct you
Some poor replica of your beauty
But how do you replicate perfection
Besides, it wasn't me who gave you life
I just happened by one day
And was forever changed

I can't promise to stop longing
Can't write you out of the song
That haunts me in the night
But will I be all right
When the gears rust shut
And nothing is left but
Quiet

When they don't even know you exist

It takes my breath away for just a moment, there in my inbox, the subject line without any brackets so it looks like it's a personal message. Just for me. It isn't. It's a blog title without any brackets.

And it's a beautiful entry, as always. Beautiful and meant for all of us.

I stifle the disappointment and tell myself those same things, things I hate hearing but know to be true. Things like it isn't about me, and to remember the big picture, and that God knows my heart and that's all that matters. And that I should be ashamed for wanting something more personal.

I wonder if anyone will ever feel that kind of happiness when she sees my name her inbox. I wonder if my offerings will ever disappoint when the brackets show.

I want to stay personal. I want those for whom I write to know they matter to me. No. I want her to know she matters to me. It isn't about me, but I want it to be about her.

I want to keep loving those beautiful women who write for all of us, even when they don't know I exist. Because they are reaching hearts just like I long to do, touching lives and making a difference and bringing smiles to faces of beautiful women who really need them. All faces just like mine.

Dusk

I wish I could describe this, writing here at my desk while a breezy spring dusk settles quietly around our quaint little house on Memory Lane.

I wish I could capture the way the wind rustles the leaves and sets the wind chimes outside my office window to a dancing and singing that calms me way deep down.

I wish I could tell how the crickets tweeping and a distant dog bark mingle with a far-off sound of a closing car door and leaves me with a feeling of being part of a community among these wide mossy trees and docks where hungry turtles await bits of bread, and the narrow lanes and little bridges where duck families crossing all in a row remind me to go slowly, always go slowly across.

I wish I could share this sense of beauty, this peace, this joy that I would love to put into words.

If only I could.

Safe

i cried to you, my heart laid bare
and you stepped close and held me there
for moments there i couldn't speak
no words would come; my voice was weak
when finally i could meet your eyes
i searched them but saw no surprise
just love like none i'd ever felt
so deep i thought my soul would melt
your soft expression seemed to say
my child, give me your thoughts today
i smoothed my hair with trembling hand
inept to help you understand
the ache within, not even i
could word the pain or quell the why
of being left outside alone
to face the darkness on my own
but as i pondered all these things
it brushed me like a monarch's wings
the kindness in your gentle look
as though you wrote me in your book
and somehow even scared i knew
it's safe to give my heart to you

Words

I've neglected coming here for a while. Not because it matters little to me, but because my energies have been spent deeply at Write Where It Hurts. I have missed being here.

In working on yesterday's WWIH column post, I was thinking about words and how our amazing God wired me to love them. It reminded me of a poem I wrote a year or so ago after reading a book entitled Poemcrazy.

i must have created quite a picture
dozing with a giant white bear
in the crook of my arm
Poemcrazy scrawled across the bookjacket
covering my face and making a slight
indentation across my right cheek
it wasn’t a nap, entirely
not even rest, since words danced and floated
through my mind, tempting, tantalizing
like a cummings poem i’d read as a child
(it stuck with me, his style, only i didn’t know then
that something in me was secretly longing for that kind
of freedom; i rediscovered him today in the pages pressing against my forehead)
i must have seemed a taciturn eccentric
hands limp and relaxed as verse took shape
behind the book resting on my face
shielding my eyes from the sunlight of midday
(though not my ears from the whine of a weed machine
wielded by a well-intentioned neighbor)
i recalled lines i’d read moments before
and how i had smiled at the mention of word games
i’d played in my girlhood
how did she know
i dreamed in word tickets of meander and flummox and herb garden
and winery and worthlessness and side-winder
while the whining ebbed and flowed and breezes blew
and my hair tickled me awake
so even though it might appear i’d left behind
lazy susans and black-eyed peas and catharsis
in the land of a people i call the ballantrae
my favorite thing of all is that
i feel a little bit like a poet today

After a long dry spell

When it's been a long time, it can be hard to start again.

I navigate these waters in a boat I keep patching with that pizza man's help because he is always near me. I would be lost without him. Our children, mostly all grown up now, are making their way each their own and it can be hard to keep up with all the twists and turns and rough places.

But we keep patching and we keep paddling and we keep praying. God's grace stays right here with us and holds our patches fast and keeps loving us and giving us more and more grace for the moments that we try to turn around and extend outward to those who might need it at the time. Mostly, I think, it's me who needs it.

This will be our third son to wed. It will be a Sunday afternoon wedding near the end of a beautifully mild Florida November on a day that in the past has brought tears. We are hoping for the coming tears to be good ones.

Today was Thanksgiving Day. It was a confusing day for me, bizarre in its difference with our family gathering and meal postponed a day and all of this day spent cleaning and organizing and trying to make sense of personalities until I fell off to sleep in the afternoon in our big canopy bed. It was nearing dusk when the grandbaby arrived and attention turned to little feet pattering over wood floors and cookie-smudged face and babbled words for everything she sees. She sleeps now, among soft blankets on Pappaw's side of the bed until her mama and daddy come to scoop her up pigtails and all and take her home.

Tonight I am grateful, truly. I am grateful for a rusty but renewed ability to write, the unwordable comfort of being able to pray, and the love that patches all things together.

When it's dark

It feels empty.