I was thrown for a loop but caught myself
as I was falling into dread,
Noosed my nagging “what if” thoughts, &
thought “so what” instead.
Poem title from chapter 57 of poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge.
Peace to your ♥!
Tribute to Walt Whitman / caterpillar poets
Another Walt Whitman poem I wrote can be found here. I’ve read very little of Leaves of Grass but am inspired by Whitman nonetheless! Peace to your ♥!
Tribute to Walt Whitman who revised Leaves of Grass repeatedly until he died Sculptors of marble chip and chip away. Potters knead and shape their lumps of clay. Poets create, through words alone, What never cracks, is never set in stone.
caterpillar poets Oh, to be a Whitman! They digest Leaves of Grass. Living day by daydreams… these, too, shall pass. Eating, dreaming, dying— without flying.
Poem title from chapter 58 of poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge.
Just Saying
What I felt in each instance [when her parents died] was…regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and humiliation they each endured.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
How easy
it came to us—why
doesn’t Dad
just [insert
action here]: call the doctor,
or get off his butt
and go up
and sit with Mom, or
say something,
or agree
to wearing Depends. Perhaps
it depends on who
is doing
the asking and who
the doing.
This saying
is also true: you don’t know
until you’ve been tried.
The one-year anniversary of my dad’s death is coming up this Monday. He was (not) dealing with his own cancer throughout my mom’s time on hospice. Peace to our ♥s!
Rheumatism in My Rhythm
My spondees aren’t responding,
My trochees have locked their doors,
I have “I am nots” instead of iambs
And pterodactyls by the score.
My meter’s off and running wild,
My feet are growing worse,
I’ve got rheumatism in my rhythm
And perverse instead of verse!
Peace to your ♥!
poems and the body
Poems are lifelines when you forget how to swim in your skin and are like a betta fish treading water in a tank, and when you want to forget how it feels to live without lungs gasping for air like a hooked trout on a riverbank.
Poem title from chapter 24 of poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge.
Peace to your ♥!
the blue socks
everything depends
upon
the white socks
not being beside
the new
blue jeans
in the washing
machine.
Poem title from chapter 54 of poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge.
This is not the first time I’ve riffed on William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” My thanks to him. Peace to your ♥!
Winter Blues
When
leaves depart,
that’s the start
of winter blues:
When
lonely trees
post vacancies
and all the sky
shows through.
First day of winter! Peace to your ♥!
abracadabra
Pick up your wand.
Tap your black hat.
Say the magic word.
Pull out a…cat?
Put away the wand.
Get rid of the hat.
Make Abracadabra
The name of your cat.
Poem title from chapter 48 of poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge.
I now have a grandcat, as my two daughters living in Chicago have adopted a black cat they’ve named Bean. 🐈⬛ Peace to your ♥!
Interlude
May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over and our work is done. Then in his mercy may He give us a safe lodging and a holy rest and peace at the last.
Cardinal Newman
The one-year anniversary of my mom’s death was this past Saturday. The interlude in the poem occurred a few weeks after she died and lasted only briefly, as my dad went downhill pretty quickly after that. The quote above was on a sympathy card I received. Peace to our ♥s!
Interlude
A feeling from
out of the blue:
Mom did what
was hers to do.
I felt a lovely
buoyancy too
That vanished
as Dad’s needs grew.
a sengsong pot of possibilities
This lump of clay on the wheel— Under the thumb of the potter, Will it become a vase? A cup? An answer begins to take shape. The wheel hums; the potter hums. Ah…the pleasure of taking pains. Poem title from chapter 59 of poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge.
“The pleasure of taking pains” is from John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean? and perfectly captures how I feel about writing and revising poems. Peace to your ♥!
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