Would I Be The Same?

If

We could but give you a day of our lives
You would live to see the dawning of another century
Those you leave this day, who cannot give you life now.


If

We could reach round our arms would hold you here
As we hug to the gift of our life, where we can, if we will
Sending you away this day, gone

If

I could find any words, any meanings, any ways, any
But I sit thinking of a day you took my hand
Saying that you were glad I was back when I'd missed two weeks ill.

If

I sit very quietly and look inside my heart here mourning
I find you there a little bit of your time here, a goodness in you so indelible
Making a gingerbread house of cookies and dripping icing.

If

I could take your place I really would, many of us would
You were so brave little one in your days, every one, where none took your shoes
You call to us to make a better day, to work to better days

To see you in our actions of today, I honor you here child.

Valentine Songs

Your Call

How can a voice a person hug with distant arms?
Or writing alone assuage the desires I've known,
Absent the seeing across a face does distance harm
Through its intractable empty space?

Here in the now the morning doves speak to each other,
The chatter my comfort from a night alone rises
With mate they fly looking for a shadow cast one to another
Watching, hiding my heart here in one of her disguises

Am I a writer penning poem of delighted dawn sky?
Being rather now mother pouring batter on griddles to heat
Making my days sweetening the tea with honeyed syrup, hiding lies
That in the this of now can I be complete?

For love to hold embraced in this vast limbless void
Remember my dream where held, your actions were enjoyed.



Taken Seriously
Each breath of life this day is taken so seriously
The rain has chilled the morning to reveal the air.
Our mountains again whitening as rain falls coldly, life perilously
Awaiting the blossoming of our spring when loves' breath is there.

Crisply washed, fresh, new the day reaches out to greet
The chatter of birds gathering here, insistent on nourishment
Despite the season chill, deathly awareness, they meet
Here on my concrete seeded floor, their flock flourishing

A little fellow struts audaciously up to me watching him
Spitting angrily he's chirping fury over wet feet, my presence
In giant furry lined boots I'm shamed, breathing in.
Slide inside through my back glassdoor, enjoying heat, it's pleasant.

In body the inhalation of dawn a gentle life celebration
Chilled today by raining watery song drops absorbing winter's meditation.





There Swims Love
Bathing this earth in the waters of our lives is love,
Liquid hope seeded through, the waters lapping shores it rushes
Onto our coastlines, feeding our clouds, rain falling from above.
As water for life is required, so life love touches.

A stream of thought my flow to you releases
Prose drops that unite in still cooled reflective contemplation lakes
Catch skies with our endless charged time breaking pieces,
This ice of winter, the glistening rise of summer's wake

The river of meaning brought love, flowed you to me,
Our lovely still pond we meet fishing and slowly drink
In clear refreshing palm we hold our water as we
Fall in the pool, loves clear depths buoyed, I think.

Steam rises heated by our sun, this joy in love
Evaporates to clouds, grey skies, the cycle of sweet doves.


I'm Sorry
You wrote me a poem of love,
But it was also angry, full of fury.
I hold the disappointment
In my petty pointing
To my empty arms

While you fill my mind
My days with furious expressions
Of meanings that
Take the breath away
Move me to wanting the
Touch of your hand in mine.

Rescue Fantasy Meets Life

I have a rescue fantasy that came in a dream last night again.
I'll wake up one day in a stadium of golf, football and baseball
All sports are there and being played, (with this fantastic kids sports set up too.
It has this kid elevator to the activities for them on the various complex "floors")
Seated in one event I'm basically watching nothing, which isn't interesting me,
I look over from my seat
and see next door the old abandoned Victorian on the street that runs by this place.
The house sits stuffed by a parking garage awaiting demolition, which is so sad.
There by the stadium complex, it is completely on fire,
Mostly I see the roof, the blaze breaking through it as it reaches through to the roof.

I try to tell everyone at this sporting event that the fire is a real danger.
It is real and certainly spreading, but they don't care.
Because the sports games are now turned into somehow wrestling on a track
and they get to join in, it somehow gets interactive.
They are doing this 'review of the rules' for the wrestle fest now
As I, outside the male group, try to pull away someone to listen to fire information,
And very excited men and boys are listening intently to that rule thing
and start to wrestle in huge packs.
It is a male wrestling twisted knot of behinds sticking out.
I have to give up with my pleading to be heard.
I'm talking to their behinds to try and tell them the sky is blackened from this fire.
The cloud of smoke covers the sun.
So I call the 911 operator trying to get the fire attended,
The operator asks a lot
Of questions and tells me it's "contained" finally.
The fire I see blazing.


This cloud taking the sun away from it roiling out thick and thicker, a life ending fire.
So I go across the street to the parking garage to check things out
The fire is beside the place we parked a car.
I'm also unclear on who "we" are.
I can't remember what the car looked like really either, but want to go get it anyway.
You are not supposed to go near the place, it's taped off.
I ride on the kid elevator to get there
So I bend over like Alice and have to hold my finger down on a kid button
You have to push it a lot. In my dream I think GOOD IDEA, patent that.
(It's for kids so they like to push in the button to make it go.)
They ride this to the golfing floor
Or the soccer floor or to different places they can play sports.
One side faces a terrarium that is behind a wall of glass in the elevator.

Then on the street outside I get out
which is a completely different and a city reality
As if I did leave that sporting complex
The fire is spreading everywhere and we are calling the place San Fran.
I hear the firemen talking about how it is now "underground" and threatening three
Structures.
I see it flaming so out of control so I kind of steal my car as a get-a-way and go back on the
Kid elevator to get the people I need to get to go, who keep saying,
"What did they tell you on the phone." As if my own two eyes
Meant nothing which cycles several times.
That part the most "real."
What I saw and know is meaningless here.

Then I get involved in something where I am diverted to an outside cafe that my
Mom is running that doesn't really sell food but she seems to be considering it as she has
"customers". And into some nonsense on one of the levels of the complex
Where someone isn't really helping someone else who is dying
And not comforting them, but instead buying them a candle
Which I smash for it's wrongness and they keep giving cards and there is a judge now
Who seems to be my husband, and then isn't, that says the dying person just needed
To be talked to through the end.
At that point in an inside mall Drugstore and finally outside somehow, looking at the worst fire one could ever see that will take out this world.

In a beautiful Victorian ablaze and watching it spread to buildings and thinking
That I can't get the people I care about into the car to save because
I can't see them, find them,
Convince them, show them and so I'll either have to
Escape by driving this car away by myself or go back in and suffer this confusion.
And just be like they are, blinded by this fun going on and this sleek place.
Unconvinced anything might be able to take us out and that we might be in danger.
I know now, know for certain had I been able to be heard
Be able to be heard, we early on could have gotten out or saved ourselves.
I've always known that.

And so I go in the kids elevator and play a long time on my way back because
Being free by myself would hurt too much knowing all of this blind stupidity
And then I woke up.
Hurting, head pain, disoriented with an image of a sky thick with smoke
And an eerie sun and that house burning that had
Lit on fire the foundations of a city.