Ready to Make Friends with Poetry? ⟶
It’s the fourth day of Christmas and I’m sitting at my dining table while shadows play on the Advent wreath and the dishwasher hums. The post-holiday lull has begun, that in-between time where memories of enjoying my family’s company, complete with six noisy grandkids, partner with a looking-forward frame of mind to a new year…
Friends and family leave words on screens and phone lines, dropping voices and laughter like golden pendants rippling across the surface of my morning. Bookends of baking–pies first and the turkey last– include potatoes, The Green Bean Casserole and sweet potatoes in between. Chimes outside echo on the warm wind of a rare November day,…
This is just to say we could not eat the plums– they were so many pyramided together in plastic, hailing from casa de Costco where everything is sold in bulk. We could not eat the plums. unripe as they were– purple/black skins yielding to (very) firm yellow (oh! not sweet) flesh. We enlisted children, yea…
There is an altar here– facing the supply cubbie flanked by the printer (bedecked with Post-it notes), computer at my alternate elbow. Stray crackers sit open next to the pen and paper and glasses, mid-snack, abandoned. Paper, tape, scissors stapler–all adorn this secular cum sacred space. How so? I folded my hands in prayer and…
We’ve been informed we are flying at 29,000 feet (approximately) above the face of the Earth, suspended (how? by speed, lift and whatnot) like a moving planet jettisoned in a line moving at the speed of sound (light?). Refreshments are served, secured with invisible payments traveling via plastic and magnets swiped by staff standing still…
House finches flit, flit, flit and hummingbird whirrrrrs, hovering over birdseed an arm’s length away. Red finch jets elsewhere, bearing left at the bushes and the chickadee perches, eyeing the feast. Crows alight silently on the trees straight ahead, swooping at nothing as they loudly announce the morning. The waterfall sound of freeway cars and…