NOVEMBER 2023 SHARING.
“There is a kind of skitteryness about November, thinks Flossie. It is a month both ominous and nervous. The crisp displays of October, all its smart oranges and yellows,
have been spoiled and scattered about as November rushes in, dragging winter behind it like a trail of rattling cans.”
From The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
Two Poems
When Dad died and left Mom alone, she went through her things and found enough items about my early life that she was able to present me with a bulging scrap book. Today I was going through it and found a poem written when I was thirteen. What was I thinking then? Read it and tell me.
A voice cries out “Stay, stay,
Don’t go there, come this way.”
Another bellows “No, you’re wrong.
It’s over here that you belong.”
Someone shouts “You fool. You’ll fail.
Your travels are to no avail.”
And yet I wonder am I wrong?
Is it false to sing my song?
I’m happy as I choose to be,
I live the life I want, I’m free.
So glad that others aren’t like me.
Again, I ask. What do you think I was thinking?
Let’s jump ahead to 2023, when I’m seventy-six. Here is a recently published poem. It was selected to appear in this spring’s issue of The Arrow, A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics. This issue honored Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh”s life and teachings.
So Hum
I am the scent of a trellised flower,
climbing pink Peace Rose
on this sunny, summer day
at an open second story window.
My intoxicating inhalation of me
carries my mind away to Heaven:
Paradise within my soul.
I am a dancing raindrop
falling on high Beech Hill
into river’s rampant flow
rushing through the lowest places
then gliding through smaller ponds
slipping across a mammoth lake
on to my own true ocean home.
I am a stunning shining star
embedded in the Milky Way
often seen from Earth so brightly
other times behind high clouds
made of flimsy ice crystals
or dimmed by full moon light,
my presence scarcely known.
I am the breath of Winter Wind,
harsh one day, but warm another.
Erratic gusts thrust at you,
biting northwest after a storm.
Followed by a deceitful southwester.
Then back to frigid gales
with hail and heavy snow
I am a tiny dormant seed
tossed into a garden furrow,
Left to sprout or rot in dampness.
Fate is not my choice alone
until the warm spring sun
coaxes my fate into bloom.
I am a rose.
I actually like the first poem more than the second. What about you?
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