glimmer

In the cool dark of the bedroom, afternoon, after work, after many hours awake and fragmented by the needs of the day, push-pull, ache in the throat, thirsty for quiet, and now I’m face down among the bedclothes and the cat comes up and brushes against my foot. Just this. Fur on skin. I take […]

Morning Poem # 3

Swallows swoop in at the barn door
and their feathers, bones filled with air,
brush up against the corrugated metal roof.
The air is rife with musk and hay
and the hot piss of sheep
pressing against each other
in woolly urgent nearness.
The sky bends down closer to the earth now;
blue tucking the edges of the vermilion mountains in;
and every […]

Morning Poem # 2

Because his small hand fits into my palm still,
I hold my breath and feel the gills of my heart
pummel inside my chest.
There is no way for keeping this;
like stacking bags of sand
against the jetty,
crumbling
no way to keep back his tide of growing up.
“I’m you’re a little bit big boy,” he whispers
against my cheek in the […]

Morning poem # 1

The sun falls in broken rectangles on the floor
shards of yellow plates
we gather in our pockets,
for the winter ahead.
Our skin bare to the wind, the grass tattoos
our arms with zig zags and clover
while the moments grow steady
and the verdant humming
of summer dwindles
into the big-moon nights and stillness.

September mornings

Sometimes there are other things. Mornings of sleeping in an extra half hour instead of getting up and dragging myself to the keyboard in the pre-dawn chill, because my days already feel like the fragile worn fabric of a quilt. The first flu of the season has me bleary eyed and achy. I’d whimper, but […]

Two kinds of prayers

Praying
It doesnt have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and dont try
to make them elaborate, this isnt
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
__Mary Oliver

Another Morning Poem

Letting Go
I open my hand and the hundred small birds of my heart
flutter out, wings rumpled from the tight fist I’ve carried them in.
They fall to the ground before flying up, knowing something of soil and grief.
I can’t shake this feeling now. Nights up, hearing the house move,
the small birds flit restlessly about the […]

A morning poem

Like a cold draft from the crack in the lintel
the day of the killing keeps creeping back in;
making my heart beat faster, unbidden.
All the things I tried to avoid by covering my eyes
at the movie theater again and again
rush up now, in the quiet moments
when I’m there in the dark
rocking my son to sleep.
Or in […]

Morning Poem Snippets

Until I catch up with my life again, a handful of snippets will have to do. Here are a few unedited lines that surfaced in the midst of my morning poem chaff over the past few days.
I am so inspired by your lists of life-altering artists, writers, etc. I want to compile them into […]

Morning Poem # 6

All night the cat slept curled
on the chair opposite the bed,
content to hear the heartbeats of her humans
lost in slumber.
Now she wakes and stretches
a beautiful apostrophe of feline ease,
becoming a comma, then an M
before she struts away.