Day 6
Category: Waxing Poetic
National Poetry Month Daily Haiku
I’ve been rather lazy poetically speaking these past few months. Perhaps National Poetry Month can help to dislodge me from this lethargy. To celebrate, I’m contributing one Haiku per day throughout April.
Why not do the same?
This pedlar in impatient thoughts
This pedlar in impatient thoughts
travels light but burrows down, heavily
down, and down and down again;
to the parsonage of promise, wall-papered
in the sweat of dreams.
The days, carefully patented against
her own times, roll out
like dried tobacco leaves, the inhalation of
a promise, made, kept,
broken, and made again.
Pencil sketch clouds smudge
a looming graphite across the vast skin of sky.
The forest, sotta voce, stock still, looks
nowhere but down to the nourishing dirt,
kneels up to the humming heavens.
And, for all this cantabile chorus,
throats out a steely enervation,
where none but she can hear the silent praise.
She grapples in morning still
and shivering, licked up from bowls
of her own gratitude, there
to shimmer hints of the new,
bridal day.
In the interest of recusing myself
In the interest of recusing myself
from the intentional acts of living in
salience and satisfaction,
I remove paper clips from bundles
and places of collecting –
days not yet taken,
things taken too often,
conversations unfinished,
gazes left unyielded to awe.
And I forget to wait.
In the interest of restraining myself
from the morbidity of beloved melancholy
I reach across heavens of tear-stained songs
and their owners, too shy to keep singing –
and touch the lips of those like me,
who might never have sung
were it not for those heaven-kissed notes.
And I forget to wait.
In the interest of reinventing myself
I recall to mind the person least reticent
to dance naked before the large window –
unblinking, shameless with wanton wit;
those long-wished for days not yet cast aside.
Not forgotten, merely unremembered.
A bold and chivalrous persona void of
the self-effacement unknown in our youth.
And I forgot to wait.
I never said
I never said the treetops would be
enough to hide the lost points on your map.
They might just join together long enough
to sing something jaunty for the trip.
I never said that all conversations
would tell you enough to end your doubts.
But they might plant some
new ones that aim for the same end.
I never said you’d always have great birthday
parties with candles enough to roast popcorn.
But, with each new year, another candle brings
you that much closer to salting the world.
I never said the laws of nature would always
accommodate your need to experiment with pride.
But, neither did I say they were obvious enough
not to take you where you most want to go.
I never said the distances were short between
laughter and pain, burden and light.
But there will never be a better time to convince
you of your own staunch goodness.
I never said that you’d find the thing
you’d been looking for.
I prayed you have one more day to meet
your fears in the pursuit.
I never said I wouldn’t disagree.
Just that I’d always engage.
I never said I’d always remember.
Just that I’d regret the forgetting.
I never said you wouldn’t rage against the world.
But it just might hear your voice.
I never said I’d never leave you.
I said you wouldn’t always need me to stay.
I never said I’d never say such things.
For I am you.
Arrivals
The soup is better having room to steep
in the deeper time of its own goodness.
Many things unite in one great thing.
We learn hunger.
The ground, now patched and sown together
with summer’s glowing refuse, is somehow brighter –
having taken its time.
We learn beauty.
Her pleasure, no fait accompli,
but in a reverence for slow heights.
Climb slowly this peak.
We learn desire.
Her tiny immensity, a sacred squalor, protrudes
nose first, dark to light, damp and cold –
one last hurrah of anonymity before donning
the first breaths of vulnerability.
We learn awe.
Pulled nose first into the warmth
of kitchen bread, newly plump and rising to greet us
square in tongue and tonsil, teasing
and teaching the crust-browned life.
We learn perfection.
Shoes, worn and well-gravelled, grind away
at the miles. A distance made less with repetition –
repetition of repeated renewals of the long
overcoming of road.
We learn perseverance.
And, in all of it remains the best of all our waiting.
One arrives, caught in the minutiae of the cosmic unseen.
Here to surprise our own expectations.
Come to convince us of lost remembrances.
The one great beauty in our catalogue of fear.
We learn salvation.
