The ravens’ wings flashed
In a high sun
Purple blue iridescences
Like a mob of teenagers
Good natured
Unruly
Riding the sky
Like bicycles
Climbing and coasting
Taste testing freedom
Carefree-ing exhilaration
Squeezing dare
into every fibrous feather
Resonating flares
Into every hollow bone
Riding invisible drafts higher
And higher
Bold and fierce
Plumes of feathers
Cawing, climbing,
Defying
Alive
My daughter draws on the pages of my diary
Strong lines that are her–strong willed,
loving, frustrating,
so much me and not me.
Lines that split my words and remind me
of the divide
between what I can write and what I can feel.
Poetry sometimes fills this divide,
softens the line and
takes us to a place where
words become soil, born from
constant decay.
Life we can’t predict.
Messy life we can’t clean,
only nourish the best we can
to be a life line
that sprouts from words
up and to the sun.
Always up and to the sun.
A moment or two, but maybe now the moment is gone. What do I want words to do? To capture a moment, or two, like this one, when the sun is now shining away the snow and my girls are sleeping upstairs. I think! Emptiness seems to be the way of life now. To empty the anger and longing over and over again. To empty and empty until hollowness resounds with surrender and surrender becomes real and the monotony isn’t really the thing, it’s the hollowness resounding with the everydayness of things. The idea of a country, of a religion or a dogma, all of these slip away when you try to stand on them. Then what remains? What foothold is there for an idea of God? Who can give me the answers to my questions about why we die? What happens when we die? Why we live? What is this happening that I call life and why am I so small and what matters? Questions so many people have asked so many times before. Questions that are the toe holds of intricate philosophies I no longer have the energy or time to study or wrap my mind around. Not when my body wraps around my smallest while I breastfeed her, or my arms wrap around my oldest as she screams her way through another tantrum. Empty again, it is so much easier than hanging on. It is so much easier than holding in. Dissolve. Empty. Cut loose. Surrender.
Motherlife