Here’s the first poem I fell in love with and the one I want to share with you here on National Poem in Your Pocket Day. Enjoy!
To Make a Prairie
by Emily Dickinson (1755)
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Emily Dickenson, poem, poem in your pocket, poetry, poetry month | Leave a Comment »
April is National Poetry Month! Celebrate your literary heritage by recording and sharing your favorite poem on Soundcloud through the Poetry Foundation’s record-a-poem project.
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In the beginning, the white-frocked horseman of her apocalypse
Eyes averted, blurts she has pancreatic cancer in store
She rocks, absorbs our reeling shock then, pensive, quips
A curious “Well, I’ve never done cancer before.”
Fumbling with forms and facts in cheerless waiting rooms
She regales us with tales from her career as a Navy wife
Three cherished years in postwar Japan she relives and subsumes
In incurably merry memories of a zestfully lived life
In the middle, emerging greyly from another grueling test
The hospital directory’s alien “-ology’s” and “-atrics”
Cause her to chuckle as she reads, pretending not to rest
“I’m so glad I’ll get to die someplace exotic!”
A winner in a losing battle, no cause she saw for why-ning
Resolute she rallied for a family trip to New York City
Boosted by a Broadway play, a tour and some fine dining
Nearing escape velocity from death’s gravity
In the end, the ruinous thief was something mercifully other
Something sudden and biliary that we did not expect
A stealthy ninja stroke that clove the waning moon of mother
The surgeon tried but could not mend the vile duct
In hospice care, no tying tubes or talk of chemo any more
Little talk at all, the less said now she knew the better
Haiku pointing at a transcendent shore
Haiku pointing
Pointing
___________________________
Copyright Deborah A. McGlauflin, January 2013. All rights reserved.
Posted in Randoms, Rogues and Outliers | Tagged cancer treatment, haiku, hospice postwar Japan, hospital cancer ward, pancreatic cancer, poem | Leave a Comment »
Seven times down
Grateful I have only two
Wobbly ankles, knees and hips
And one nagging back
Each in painful turn decries and vies
Body awareness by missteps
The rising is in the falling
Eight times up
Aha! This body’s not just a taxi
For my unmindful mind, not so at all
I’m both Story and Soma
Breathe and sense and feel
The present fully embodied
Or missed in mind’s mist
_______________________________
Copyright Deborah A. McGlauflin. All rights reserved. January 11, 2013.
Posted in Being Otherwise poetry collection | Tagged ankle injury, back pain, body, breathing, falling, hip injury, knee injury, misstep, present awareness, soma | 1 Comment »
Wind wails, fraught with ice
White on gray the roiling bay
Gulls remain, silent
______________________
Copyright Deborah McGlauflin, December 26, 2012. All rights reserved.
Posted in Randoms, Rogues and Outliers | Tagged Chesapeake Bay, haiku, poem, seagull, winter storm | Leave a Comment »
Not meant to beat for only me
My captive heart now shatters
Its shards slip through my boney cage
Made plural by sad matters
Outlaw compassion on the run
Last seen winging north and true
To where the twenty-six are missed
Where grief is thick and blue
Now circling ’round the school like crows
A flock of lamentation
Our broken hearts converge to mend
A small town and a nation
_______________________
Copyright Deborah McGlauflin, December 2012. All rights reserved.
Posted in Being Otherwise poetry collection | Tagged broken heart, compassion, grief, lament, Newtown, sorrow | 1 Comment »
In the end, it’s not the end
Of the causes and conditions that brought us here
Of the dizzying fizz of wisdom and folly
Our hearts pump like mollusks
By ancient bivalve habits we’re compelled
Sifting barren clouds of mud
Opening and closing to ourselves
And to each other
I insert my voter card. Click!
The choice, all mine, revealed
In an empty white screened moment
Before the obscuring names appear
Today’s choice the same as yesterday’s
The same as tomorrow’s:
To subsist in cold and sluggish depths
Or heed the unshelled yearning
_______________________________
Copyright Deborah McGlauflin, November 2012. All rights reserved.
Posted in Being Otherwise poetry collection | Tagged ballot, bivalve, candidate, compassion, contemplate, contemplation, election, mollusk, vote, voter, voting, wisdom | Leave a Comment »
Drive-through reminder
“Billions served” in neon blazed
Super-sized resolve!
———————–
Copyright Deborah McGlauflin. All rights reserved. July 2012.
Posted in Being Otherwise poetry collection | 1 Comment »
Softening the blow with sighed regret
The dentist intones what my tongue already knows
“That tooth needs a crown, and soon.”
Blast! There goes the new refrigerator!
Carried off by waves of why this and why me and why now
The tooth’s mere pain recedes, nearly forgotten
Buried under fast-laid sediments of self-pity and indignation
Woe the frocked and glove-clad messenger!
Above the bib, my weapon eyes shoot accusing darts
The brave nurse leans into the line of fire and says, “Now, now…”
REWIND.
“That tooth needs a crown, and soon.”
The sound just an echo, already fading and joining
The words, reminders of the sad crumbling
Of all our proudly cobbled and certainly doomed edifices
Briefly fixable with enamel patches and without fixation
Who is this queen who thinks she needs a crown?
At best, an ephemera with a softened and grateful heart
One who knows the lie of “I” and daily vows to bear the aches of all
Beyond the fear-born need for stories, beyond hope of glory
She leans readily into the line of fire with a comforting, “Now, now…”
___________________
Copyright Deborah A. McGlauflin, July 2012. All rights reserved.
Posted in Being Otherwise poetry collection | Tagged Buddhism, Buddhist, crown, dental, dentist, Dharma, echo, enamel, hope and fear, nurse, pain, poetry, tooth | 2 Comments »
