Category: poetry

Appetite

The initial spoonful –
salted caramel cool –
consoles bitten tongue,
slides down burning throat:
appeasement for churning gut.

Each spoonful savoured
sweetness countering bile,
dark chocolate shavings
as bittersweet as the emotion
being pushed down, buried

Bruised by conflict,
words ineffectual,
ice cream an unworthy
compensation, cravings
turn to salty reprieve.

Paper Pushing

I am contributing!

Are these lessons not
abundance – success?

Authorities are dissatisfied;
want me back in the game,
insist disability has an end –
analyze me to depletion
their plans shutting me down,
unforgiving –

Encouragement is called for,
and hopeful help,
something to prod progress

This bureaucratic tapping
turns on me,
creativity breaks down.

 

Cryptic

Is the writing on the wall so cryptic –
graphic images depicting rage,
flames of dissonance,
young men bleeding at their own hands
compassion incapacitated.

A sad awakening for a society fixated
on rights and privileges, dominating
culture to the exclusion of nurturing
humanity, preserving lives.

How can we continue to closet
our children’s pain – their vitality
oozing – hopelessly abandoned
by morality’s shelter?

It is the wall, not the spatters
of blood upon it,
which needs amending –
adolescent minds too tender
to wade through the cryptic messages
of priorities so divided.

Night Calls

A shrill note
pierces night’s curtain –
an insistent, pestering alarm

Is it loneliness
that motivates the caller –
the need for a warm body
to calm her feathered fears
or a throaty hum to lull her?

Or is this an infant cry,
a hunger for nourishment
anxious in separation
waiting for mother’s
regurgitated assurances,
father’s watchful stance.

An onerous honk
breaks through
the high-pitched peep
and then, as
warmth wanes
a softer, sweeter
melody presents
followed by
a laughing trill

avian pleasure
prefacing night’s slumber.

Mortality

Death came for me
in that year of awakening
before numbers doubled
and puberty banished
autonomy – it knocked.

Peace accompanied certainty
as I lay, motionless in the water’s
depths, surprised at the absence
of panic, of struggle, a resigned
surrender overtaking me.

Light beckoned and a harmonic
chorus, like the whisper of angels
intoned  : Be strong,and
Know you are not alone,
before l lost consciousness,

And when I came to, sopping wet,
dry land beneath me, the softness
of death’s light, and the voice
of Heaven’s choir remained
etched in my soul’s memory.

 

Contracting

Problematic situations
invite expansion – ego
near the point of torment

I am outcast –
newcomers fail to understand –
this missing motor

so I retreat –
into distraction
fail to reveal
caregiver

left to seek
scattered connections
self-absorbed

needy, settled
idly moving towards
desolation

abandoned on the edge
of initiation –
ego contracting.

A Falling Out

Drunken bodies –
silhouettes of adults –
ignore posted warnings
and locked gates –
clumsily scale fences
and plunge into dark,
their hoots echoing
between uniformly
lined-up balconies –
pristine rows of duplicate
houses, trimmed beds
and cement curbs
punctuating order.

I watch, horrified,
feel the bile rise,
have signed responsibility,
will bear the brunt
of any damage –
am burdened with worry
unwilling and unable
to take such a risk;
walk away and await
the fallout…

A vainless fret –
two old women
testing the rules,
stretching the limits
of structured guidelines
more ridiculed than
prosecuted, but the rift
has been solidified

used, I feel, and
disrespected, enraged –
not yet able to examine
the tension settings
of self-imposed restraints,
carefully guarded decorum
choking out compassion –
sensibility rattled.

(The story behind the poem is posted at One Woman’s Quest II)