Month: July 2015

“Blessing in the Chaos” by Jan Richardson

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

To all that is chaotic

in you,
let there come silence.

Let there be
a calming
of the clamoring,
a stilling
of the voices that
have laid their claim
on you,
that have made their
home in you,

that go with you
even to the
holy places
but will not
let you rest,
will not let you
hear your life
with wholeness
or feel the grace
that fashioned you.

Let what distracts you
cease.
Let what divides you
cease.
Let there come an end
to what diminishes
and demeans,
and let depart
all that keeps you
in its cage.

Let there be
an opening
into the quiet
that lies beneath
the chaos,
where you find
the peace
you did not think
possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.

~ Jan Richardson, paintedprayerbook.com

“I Don’t Miss It” by Tracey K Smith

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.

Tracy K. Smith, “I Don’t Miss It” from Duende. (Graywolf Press, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Tracy K. Smith.

 

“The Scientist Talks Love” by Jessica Therese

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry1 Comment

A scientist equates love to a chemical imbalance
in the brain which releases serotonin.

A zoologist states it’s otters, cradling the smoothest
stone in their pouch, holding hands to stop them
from drifting apart while they sleep.

A musician plays it off as the silence between
the last crotchet held by the orchestra and the rupture
of applause from the audience.

A electrician declares it’s crackling sparks
in reach like miniature fireworks.
It’s sliding a fork into a toaster without a fatality.

A poet writes that love is always fatal.

An astronomer proposes it is the night, the current,
and the stars competing for his attention: who won?
The stars, the stars, the stars.

An explorer claims it’s reinventing the atlas.
It is how the continents can’t stop steering away
from one another.

A magician whispers love is trickery.
It’s fooling the spectators into believing all of this is real.

My mother softly says the red spots we see
when we close our eyes are guardian ghosts
trying to leave us messages. “That is love.”

A blind man murmurs it’s recognising
someone just by touch alone.

An artist says nothing, but flings
yellow paint at the canvas.

A child exclaims love is fairy floss
stuck between her back molars.

An ambulance driver believes love
is making it in time.

I believe love is the way the sun
continues to blare down on us so ashamedly,
even when our eyes strain
to look at it.

– Jessica Therese, “The Scientist Talks Love”

 

*

“What’s Love Got to Do With It?” by Tina Turner (unplugged)

“Fictional Characters” by Danusha Laméris

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the white pages
and enter our world?

Holden Caulfield slipping in the movie theater
to catch the two o’clock
Anna Karenina sitting in a diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
serves up a cheeseburger.

Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires the tulips.

Maybe they grew tired
of the author’s mind,
all its twists and turns.

Or were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.

For others, it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they’d been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.

Whatever the reason,
here they are, roaming the city streets
rain falling on their phantasmal shoulders.

Wouldn’t you, if you could?
Step out of your own story,
to lean against a doorway
of the Five & Dime, sipping your coffee,

your life, somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.

“Fictional Characters” by Danusha Laméris from The Moons of August. © Autumn House Press, 2014.

“Early in the Morning” by Li-Young Lee

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

Li-Young Lee, Rose