Tag Archives: Beloved

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Shapes and songs

The Ballad of the Shape of Things is one of those songs that I learned very young and from my cousins, so I did not know who recorded it. Another “dead girl song” only this one is a “dead guy song”. I loved the puns: “They say he died of the chickenpox. In part I must agree, one chick too many had he.” I also liked songs with words I didn’t know: transom, in this one. We were fairly bloodthirsty kids and happily learned songs about death, unfaithful lovers, murder, betrayal, noble suicide to save the highwayman, and so forth. My Darling Clementine, another dead girl song. We had a very educational childhood in song.

We needed the triangular “garment thin that fastens on with a safety pin” explained at the end of the song, because the cloth diapers we’d experienced were rectangular. I find memorizing things that rhyme and especially if there is a story and a tune, much easier than memorizing the varied side effects of drugs such as ACE inhibitors. The story behind the side effects escapes me, though maybe there is one! Think of that, a ballad of the ACE inhibitors, with each one having its individual good and bad effects! I am certain that I could make up a story, even if we don’t really understand all the effects.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: triangle.

Here is a side effect song, though not quite what I have in mind.

The photograph is my sister Chris and me, at my father’s 70th birthday, 2008, taken by my friend Malene.

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Travel back

This weekend I traveled east and a friend that I’ve known since I was in high school and she was taking a year off from college, met in Glenwood Springs. We soaked in the amazing hot springs there and then stayed in Carbondale. We managed two more hot springs the next day. Saturday evening we went to Steve’s Guitars and heard Quinlan Valdez. He is touring from Wyoming and we intersected with his tour and enjoyed it very much.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: nostalgia.

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Incomparable courage

I’ve chosen incomparable for today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt. Yesterday I posted one version of the song Waterbound. Rhiannon Giddens does the traditional version, but then I come across this song. Wow. And yes, such courage in people enslaved and there is still slavery in the world.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: incomparable.

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Take off

Our family of four is visiting the Hoh Rain Forest. I think my husband is a relatively normal person and that he and my daughter are just being silly.

Suddenly they morph into dinosaurs! Pterodactyls! Ferocious long toothed beaks and weird speckled feathers! My son looks at me and gives me a hug. “Thanks, mom.” He morphs too and they are in flight, off in to the rain forest!

They weren’t being silly. They were practicing and apparently my daughter has now learned to fly.

I still miss them terribly and hope that they are well. Be careful, and do not marry a pterodactyl.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fiction.

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Missing water

I miss my Salish Sea. At home I can’t see it from my house, but stand in the middle of my street and there it is.

All that water. There are mountains here and trees, but they are very different. Here it is high desert, 4600 feet and up. The Grand Valley is at 4600 feet and the mesas rise from here. I miss Port Townsend Bay, and the big trees.

Gold sky and blue water. Look! A grebe! Catching breakfast!

A pair.

And they dive.

Gone.

They are small on the big water.

Taken in November, 2018.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: contemplation.

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Forgiveness

Rumi writes about the wound being where the light gets in. Leonard Cohen says the cracks are where the light gets in. My poems about being reborn or changed seem to involve either burning or the sea. I wrote this in 2009.

Forgiveness

I want to forgive something
Someone
In fact a group
Something that hurt a lot
I’ve tried logic
I tell myself
“It was an expression of concern”

My heart doesn’t agree
It is sullen
Immobile and grumpy
It whispers
“They have not apologized”
It whispers
“When people say you’re crazy
It could be a joke
An expression of concern
It wasn’t
It was a palm held out
At arm’s length
To distance me.”

My head argues
“That’s what it felt like to you.
You don’t know their intentions.”

I want to write
A poem of forgiveness
Hoping my heart will follow

My conscious doesn’t write my poems
My conscious wrestles with an idea
The poem comes out of this struggle
I look at the poem I’ve written
I think,
“That is what I would like
my conscious heart to feel.”
My poem is often more generous
than my conscious feels

My poems are not mine
They are a gift
From the unconscious
It is much larger
Than the small conscious me
I dream of feeling envy
I climb into a bathtub
And transform myself
To battle a trickster
We are transported
To the bottom of the ocean

In the ocean
The trickster and I are one
It is unlimited
It is not my unconscious
There is no separation
It is all unconscious

I did not think
A poem would give forgiveness
But pain drove me
Into the sea
I am connected
You gave me these pearls
Thank you

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: crack.

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Mind

Facing a wall or lying in bed
breathe slow: four seconds in
one two three four
four seconds out
one two three four
keeping count

or facing a wall sitting
on a zafu, bell rings to start
how can forty minutes be so long?
fall asleep and body weaves
waking me up OH don’t hit the wall
adrenaline then slithering down
towards sleep again

zen mind, blank mind?
my mind wanders off again and again
what is for dinner? grocery list?
that annoying thing or person
at school or work
the mind busy as a squirrel
burying nuts and digging them back up

bring the mind back again
again again again
to the breath the wall letting go
of this well trodden mind trail
only to have the mind wander off
down another: this with briars
and falling into a pond
that has ice and cold

back shake like a dog
shake it off
focus on the breath the wall again
vivid multicolor cats
with paisley and stripes and spots
there is the BELL
forty minutes

Bow to the wall
and stretch
get up
ready zafu for the next time
meditation
mind

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Written today for the Ragtag Daily Prompt: blank.

The translation that I originally learned is here.