Three Poems

Snow Day

I'm the starving deer sniffing for a hidden bud,
a dry twig, fearful I won't have enough.

I listen as blades clear the roads so people can cross
bridges and drive to high rises in the clouds where man

wants to reach God or be a god. Here, the soft fall
of snow surrounds me and I want to find a way

to carve out a space where time doesn't move.
Come tomorrow, I'll go teach teens who like hermits

hide with hoods up, music in their ears, they haven't
yet met themselves beyond their muscle and bone.

I don't want to be the one to truncate their freedom
but deny them the ache. Instead, I'll tell them the truth

that I am a starving woman who'd rather sit with them,
and steal fire from the gods, to see the spark.

 

Equation of Sorrow to Love

Someone told me the lungs
reside at the heart chakra—
having poor lungs means
unresolved grief,
an affliction of sorrow.

Born two months early,
I learned to breathe in a box
away from home.
Often as a child I had a cough,
a hacking sound,
sometimes rattling and wet,
sometimes it sounded
like a dog's bark,
annoying those around me.

Like an open pomegranate
in my chest was my heart
already broken before I came
into this world?

Maybe I knew even then,
eyes taped shut, tubes
feeding me, legs kicking the air,
what an impossible feat it would be,
to be raw, to feel the blows of
others suffering,
coupled with my own
and remain here.

But broken or not,
my heart was defiant,
hell-bent on living
and loving deep.

 

Solar Eclipse

In a field in Missouri, we waited,
eating turkey sandwiches, grass itching
our ankles. Then in the near darkness
the birds ceased singing and we looked up.

Ancient cultures believed solar eclipses
portended doom. In that field, we were
the fools, like those in the 1940s who wore
black glasses to stare at a mushroom cloud,
not understanding the darkness yet to come.

In Hindu myths a demon's severed head flies
to block the light. We gasped when
on national television, the president tore
his paper glasses off and glared into the sun.

Only years later, we would cry until numb,
on the news one million dead. We who survived
tell stories about a demon's head, glasses
made of paper, and the darkening sun.