Saturday, December 21, 2013

This / Offerings, by Rebecca Weger


Note: This was the last week of writing circles for the year and in each session people brought special objects to put out on a communal altar, to serve as our writing inspiration. The Saturday morning circle fell on the Solstice.


This

Look at what it is to have our hearts laid out on the table
to be seen and touched and felt.

Look at what it is to have our memories and pangs of loss and hopes for the future jumbled up together, mine and yours.

This is what it is, each week, me and you.




Offerings

empathy
joy
wisdom
power
creation
memory
hope
love
change
tears
beauty
promises
celebrations
grief
birth
death
kindness
fragility
strength
stability
outpouring
loss
family
words
light
flow

Friday, December 20, 2013

Once, by Phoebe Lakin


Once we rode a train to Java and became more riveted to ourselves.

Once the roof collapsed and I attained enlightenment.

Once in a quiet corridor she tied her hands in knots and looked into the corners of a book.

Once the fierce wind ripped a hole in my heart and I sewed it up with pine needles.

Once I baked cookies out of rosemary and wet wood and left them outside where they melted.

Once I looked at the scalloped edges of the known universe and wondered about going home.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Ghostwriting, by Rob Sullivan


conduits in the rain
water flows free
seeking its level

butterfly alights
beauty overwhelms
viewer responds with vision

specters flit between
darkness and illuminati
glimpsing truth and prettier lies

history tells his story
while heart speaks
of hers

titans and demigods
flex collective muscle
paupers still beg

dreaming the big dream
soothes great aching
sounds of suffering

she walks through
her life in beauty
so deeply, must look away

when will this race
be finished
may I borrow your legs?

songs, poems, stories
were still simmering
til the flame was no more

can you teach me
to sing, play guitar
write tunes, pen words?

how can I make out the signal
amidst static diversion
unmodulated frequency?

dust, smoke, rubble
settle to silent clarity
mind expands to receive

prepare the vessel
muse infuses as a ghost
writing for the ages







Wednesday, December 11, 2013

A Small Plot of Ground, by Melissa Hamilton


Before I found my birth family, characters I’d never met danced through my head.  Once, I dreamt that I slipped into their home during a holiday meal, hiding in their pantry behind the canned peaches.
The aromas of crab cakes and corn pudding wafted in as shoes tapped on linoleum.  “They must be southern musicians,” I thought, for surely that tap had rhythm to a song I knew.  But I dared not peek.  In awakening, I went back to assuming my mother was a Russian Ballerina, it sounded more poignant and romantic . . . the gift of creating when all is unknown.
The word “Family” always had a nip too it, I envied those who resemble their sister or have traits of a great great grandmother found on Ancestor.com. I felt as if those born into a family have been given a small plot of ground on Earth, a solid history and belonging to the human race.   Without genetic relatives, it seemed I wandered untethered, like a gazelle dangerously lost from her herd.
When I first heard “we found her,” from the Children’s Home, I was given basic facts.  She was a math major and scientist, she had no other children.   I learned she had German ancestry and my father was Dutch.  As soon as the phone was in the cradle, I went outside.  The night was comfortably clear, but the stars felt too silent and turned upside down.  Suddenly everything I knew, or imagined, was wiped clean, I was not Irish and had no reason to struggle with math!   In subsequent years, we would both need to rebuild our identities, but carefully, much like an archeologist assembling ancient bones.
For several months, my birthmother and I wrote to each other anonymously.  I painstakingly formed each sentence as if sacred text, and sent them to the Children’s Home.  They removed any identifying information and mailed the letters to her.  Back and forth we wrote, gingerly sharing details and clues to our whereabouts and selves.
One day, a small package arrived, inside was a Snoopy tie tack.  “What an odd gift,” I thought, but what can one give in such an awkward reunion?  There are no Hallmark cards to congratulate you on finding genetic relatives!  Some even shake their heads and shoot despairing glances, “you ought to appreciate those who raised you,” they hiss (as if expanding one’s family negates love and loyalty) . . .
Almost twelve years later, my birthmother and I talk almost weekly on the phone.  She’s given me the first photo album of my ancestors, carefully labeled in her looping script.  Each year I learn a bit more about Aunt Florence or Uncle Harold and don’t need to hide among the canned peaches, for I’m invited into the past. 
The Snoopy tie tack was my birth mother’s clue that she worked at NASA.  If I had looked closely, he was wearing a tiny Space suit.  This tack had gone up in the Space Shuttle and was presented to my birth mother at an awards ceremony just before we met.  “Most of my coworkers passed their awards onto their kids,” said my birth mother. “Now that I have a child, I can pass it on too,” she said.
This gift twenty-eight years later, a piece of metal from Space, tethered me back to Earth.  In meeting my birth mother, I found that small plot of ground. 

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The Age of Dust, by Sara Robbins


I have a useless closet in my bedroom 

a place where things go to die — 

like the two blouses my mother made for me 

36 years ago. 

I will never wear them. 

Not just the outdated style

but they do not fit me anymore. 

She made them

on her Singer sewing machine. 

She bought the fabric and cut it. 

She made these blouses with love 

and they hang,

fading with the years, 

slowly turning to dust. 

Proof that I was loved.




NOTE: With thanks to E. B. White for providing the title for this piece

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Deliver Me a Poem, by Maureen Owens


Deliver me a poem today.
It’s time; I’m overdue.
Meanwhile, snow rests on branches,
geese lift from a field,
early morning light glows
on the gold of winter corn.

Infuse me with words.
I want to spew fine lines,
delivered with perfect breaks,
so poignant, a reader’s heart
can only swell in resonance.

Enough. We all know, a poem’s arrival
is  certain to be inconvenient,
forcing an unsuspecting poet
to resort to napkins and dull half pencils,
lucky to salvage even a morsel
of what might have been.