Of this world…

A face lay there in eternal sleep,
No smile.
No frown.
I wonder,
“After all, smiles and frowns are of this world”.

“Mine”

I own nothing
The ideas I present
The feelings I feel
The thoughts I think
And, the words I used
Or continue to use to express myself.
Everything, ever that has been
Has been through:
Absorption, assimilation, memorization
Recollection, repetition and more memorization.

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Raven

I once thought I had become so used to sorrow that I
might never speak again.

I purged myself to a mute, perfect blackness,
waiting just to give one last unhuman cry and fly away,

Anything to escape, 
to  head for the far mountains and the headwaters,

To live the life of a scavenger and beggar, a medieval vagabond,
always apart, feeding on the lives and hidden parts around me.

But letting go wasn’t an end,
merely the funeral for the lost, the old and gone, a 

Mere rolling back of the stone for
what comes next: No life without death. 

The raven, feeling the updrafts, sought high air,
above the smoke of chimneys, beyond memory.

Intrigued by shiny things, he descends, in time,
awkward and clownish on the ground.

Charmed by unconscious kindness, he can tell at a distance 
the humility that comes  from a thousand small griefs;

And trusts a bit more. Drawn by the shrewdness and subtlety
of the neglected and the oppressed, who, like him, see

The powerful ones in their brutal clarity and adapt, 
who to survive, must cultivate the grace of forgiveness, and cleverness.

Words

 

I crave the right words.
“They’ll solve any problem”.
Name it. Shame it. Smoke it out. 
Smite it without sentiment. 
I must believe. 
Poetic conceit. OCD
in a river of confusions. 
Order in chaos, 
in the mystery of my 
own despairs, questions, hopes,
doubts. Secrets. 

So… each day I
hunt the elusive truffle,
the best way
to capture a tiny
hidden reward.
I’m not “sad”. Not depressed, really.
I carry stubborn sorrows.
Grief,
and that comes as
a shock. But…

Americans Have Sacrificed So Much For What?

The voices of the dead can not cry

so we cry for them

we cry for answers, justice, equality

and we cry for accountability.

A. L. O’Prunty

Eyes

I met a widow once,
wrapped in loss.
She said
she could not see a better
day coming.

I looked over my shoulder,
along the long road,  
and gave her my eyes.

A Modern Man

I walk too often in the echoes of a cold canyon,
sometimes accompanied by my wife,
dead now barely two years. She’s silent, amused,
faintly attached to this world and soon to go again,
impatient with me for hanging onto melancholic vapors
when it’s obvious–to her, anyway–that I just haven’t wised up yet.

But I’m a so-called modern man, allergic to undue connections,
Even when a dream comes and I
am lurched through a deeper portal and part a
gauzy barrier to walk with skeptical ghosts.
All I know when I wake is this bag of meat and its
pedestrian priorities.

She knew. She told me to find someone.
Knew I would only trust the secrets, the warmth and dampness,
the round softnesses I could hold,
with nipples like rosebuds and mysterious eyes;
knew that all man’s scripture could be held on a 3-by-5 card,
if he weren’t so stubbornly drunk on himself.

Grief Journey

 

Loss and pains.
though just part of living…
set us apart,
others didn’t understand.
But we knew. We just knew. 

We wrapped ourselves 
in each other’s griefs,
grateful to need no explanations,, 
understanding without words;
afraid of more losses
(can I go through that again?) 
resisting pain, 
change and the unknown.

What Comes Before Silence

Death is not bitter
death is a silence
But dying is bitter.
Dying is hard.
With you,
it was the sound.

It was like drowning,
no detail spared,
in slow motion…

with metastases of cancer
that filled the lungs
and grew, sending out
ghastly spawn to live in bone

Standing

And oh, my dear,
what joy
to hear the robin’s call,
the cardinal’s challenge,
the excited chatter
of all the returning
migrants, full of stories
about tropical fruits
and sunny days and
nights among the
trumpet vines and
camellia blooms
on the Gulf of Mexico.

It Was the Sound

Note: Don’t be alarmed. I am OK. This poem deals with something that happened nearly a year ago, but I’m just able to work my way into it objectively. It will be in a collection soon to be published, but as I prepare the pieces, I find there are still loose ends that need to be tied up by remembering. This was one.

Death is not bitter…
death is a silence
But, the dying is bitter.
Dying is full of the noise
of the going out.
It was the sound, I think,
that still haunts me,
the sound of your
struggle, the
death rattle.
(Such a bland phrase,
nothing like the
horror of the real thing.)

It was a drowning,
slowly,
inevitably,
the lungs full of fluids produced by
the metastases of cancer
the ravisher of lungs,
scatterer of foul seeds,
ghastly, evil children to stick in bone
and brain.

The relentless
sounds of drowning, your
poor, battered breastbone lifting,
tough heart refusing to stop
long after it should have.
Morphine hid the pain
but took your mind,
filled it full of phantasms
but it at least lay a
warm blanket over the pain

But the lungs were full
and drowned you deep
in dreamy waters, hours
after your spirit had
abandoned the failing husk.
An old friend said you visited her
in a dream hours before.

You had a spirit body,
alive and vigorous and young, happy, she said,
dressed in spring clothes
and driving a sky-blue convertible.
While I tried to give the body
some peace, and listened to
the rising dreamy waters, rattling,
It was a comfort to learn
you had escaped, and
driven away on your
great adventure.

In bright sunshine,
free, in a blue convertible, like the
one you had when we met
50 years before.

hemmingplay.com

A Morning*

I remember certain things,
how it was a Sunday in
April, and the daffodils were late.
How the sun was out and
poured through the bay windows
of the bedroom, happy and warm,
like nothing was wrong,
like everything was normal.

I can’t feel it now, the exhaustion
of that awful last night,
blessed by how the brain
softens certain things with time.

Common Grief

A local story tells
of a dam that blocked a creek in late ’60.
The water rose, year by year,
seeped over a poor family’s
rocky homestead,
the one that was supposed
to be an assured future.
58 years under
the dark, cool waves,
bass and perch swimming past
foundation stones covered in mud and algae.
The loss of a dream
is a reason

Thorns of Joy

Bed of roses

Bed of thorns

Thorns of life

Thorns of sin

Sin is the cause

Sin is the lust

Crying

*Part of the “Saying Goodbye” collection to be published soon. 

Do you remember our babies’
crying through the night
with colic, red-faced, kicking,
little fists clenched, punching the air?
We took turns with
futile soothings,
new at this baby thing,
desperate to comfort, to
silence that infernal noise
so we could go to work
in a few hours and not
fall asleep in the elevator.

They didn’t seem to want
comfort, did they?

Martian Sunset

 

“Not again,” He saw the ignition begin behind her eyes. 

“God’s an amazing artist,” she said, gathering her righteous energies to spring into the “do you know Jesus? speech”. 

“I just said I’d seen a sunset as though it were for the first time. Don’t make this all about you.”

“But.. “

“No. Just don’t. I was trying to tell you something, and you were about to use my pain to evangelize. It’s selfish. It’s unworthy of you.”

Summer Wars

The dust of Summer,
rubber, barbecue and
mT air that I beg might bring the rains, Neruda’s
gold ghost, Las Manos del Dia under an umbrella say
do I comprehend, how much it may mean
to meet a grizzled old tree
hale and green
after the many deaths
of teething Winter,
hollow poems
no justice
they cannot say,
Longfellow is out walking
my cautious light around the park.

Father, Son, Stars, Loss (for Bobby)

I start to count them and stop
Not because there are too many
But because I cannot hold them
Accountable; the code sparkled
From their eternal glow calls
Me to be accountable to my life:

He Rebuilds a Lost Sister

Lost in the supermarket
My special Lego creation
Lost somewhere between
Gummies and hot dogs.

Mommy looked all over
But can’t find it
It’s okay, I’ll build another.
I know I can build another one.

One Prolonged Blast (for Grammy)

4 to 6 second pull on the ship’s whistle
Announces to others in the harbor
The romance of sea:

“Underway! Shift colors”

The Ensign now flaps from the mast.
Jack folded into a tight triangle
Stowed away until:

“Moored! shift colors.”

Altered Carbon

I pinned my phosphorus heart

to the crisp linen sleeve

of my mourning suit

where all could see

your initials

carved deep

Unsettled

The misty ridden morning
waits like a pendulum in mid swing,
cross and blue, no longer alive,
leopard printed in death’s oily colors.

I untie the souls, with the windows
curving swards bent under the dewy dunes,
haled by dawn’s wet forehead,
no graves have been dug for this.

The Reaper

The Reaper

-Linda Lee Lyberg

Every moment we lose someone

We learn the meaning of sympathy

How grief will hurt and leave us undone

But in it’s place grows sweet empathy.

Blinded by the Light

night turned Armageddon

on a guitar pick

flashes easily mistaken for fireworks

eclipsed neon lights

further fall of civilization

Charmed Life

Charmed Life

-Linda Lee Lyberg

Early on in her innocence

Grief became her recompense

Easing the constant pain

Finding comfort yet again

In the sweetness of her tears.

Cinquain: Troubles

Cascade

Of misery

As I ache for your soul

Tears

Saline expressions

of ancient grief

crystalline drops

quiver

rest briefly

before slow roll down

Weep Not

Weep not, dear ones, for I’m not there
In casket cold or graveyard bare.