in the dappled shade
black and white kitty finds joy
chasing her own tail
Clematis, Heart Haiku
halfway up the wall
clematis, purple, waves
and catches the rain
out of silence
the heart rises, stirs
opens the eyes
In Memoriam: Trayvon Martin
I’ve been largely silent regarding the issue of Trayvon Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal. As a white woman living in Boston, I don’t see the ongoing effects of racism in the same way that I did when I was living on the north side of Poughkeepsie, or growing up in a housing project in Stamford. But racism still affects me and those I love. I’d like to take a moment to honor the friends and loved ones whom I know deal with racism on a daily basis — and the friends and loved ones I never met or never got to know well because of the racist and segregated society in which I live.
From a New York Times editorial published July 14, 2013:
While Mr. Zimmerman’s conviction might have provided an emotional catharsis, we would still be a country plagued by racism, which persists in ever more insidious forms despite the Supreme Court’s sanguine assessment that “things have changed dramatically,” as it said in last month’s ruling striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act.
The Day After the Boston Marathon Bombing
Sudden violence (is there any other kind?) throws the world into sharp relief. Horror that doesn’t speak but roars in the head like the ocean. Magnolias blooming under the crescent moon.
It gives things the proper perspective, too.
Last night, laying on the bed, talking to my mother on the phone while Army Guy relaxed next to me, the younger cat purring between us, I felt utter contentment.
This morning I woke at 6:00 am to take down the emergency update on the hospital website that I maintain. Cortisol shot me awake, makes me drained and snappy today. The sun is shining, the air is crisp and lovely. The Copley Square area is closed from Mass Ave to Berkeley. Did they wash the pavement clean? Will they find who did this? Will the cycle of violence continue, into the end of the time? Is peace just a pipe dream, like dreaming for the end of hunger, the end of darkness?
All things in sharp relief, from one moment to the next.
Gratitude Day 15: Moment in the Sun
This morning on my daily walk, the woods were bare, barren, still in disarray after Sandy. Branches and whole trees strewn across the trails, the trails themselves obscured under a carpet of rust-colored oak and beech leaves. I’m fortunate enough to live next to not one but two different pieces of conservation land. On the opposite end of our townhouse complex, past a grove of eastern hemlock, is a circuit through a wetlands, boardwalk in spots, bare earth, rock, and mud in others. Closer to our house are the woods. Maintained by a different municipality, they’re the local stomping grounds of all the discontented youth in the area. We regularly come across the vestiges of bonfires and parties: carcasses of beer cases, crushed and empty cans, glass sparkling among the mica on the granite outcroppings. Once, an entire couch, or rather what remained after most of it was consumed by flame.
This morning, the woods were fully Novembered, bare branches and trunks rising over that russet-brown carpet, and the sky above marshallowed with clouds. The cold nipped along the edges of my fleece and I was glad I’d thought to bring gloves. Underneath though, legs swinging through the empty crunch of the bare woods, I felt myself opening, enlivening, made vital in the way that only the cold air can make one vital. Sweat ran down my stomach, cooled when I stopped to stretch against a boulder at the top of the hill, drove me on to greater exertion to bring my body temperature up again.
On the way back, I picked around the edges of a red oak, its entire crown fallen over a pathway as wide as a street. Someone had already visited the swamp’s pathway, taken a chainsaw to the trunks that had fallen. Who will come to tidy these woods, one small island of wildness in the city of Boston?
Later today, I drove from an off-site meeting to my office under skies still glowering and chill, skies that seemed to promise snow. Instead, at 11:00am, just as I pulled up to parking spot, the sun came slanting through my sun roof. I opened it, and basked for a moment in the November sun.
The God-Shaped Hole, the Still Water
the god-shaped hole
must remain empty
so that god can pass through
it widens like the ozone
the world ends
and begins again
the guard opens the gate
and you make your way
to the pond with its
face of glass stillness
once before you came and sat
until the birds darted
over the gulf between bushes
and a red-winged
blackbird winked at you
now the water itself gulps
and returns to stillness
in the empty space of the evening
High Summer
grass high and dry and
seeded as wheat
tips too close for focus
belly on the blanket beside it
a bowl of blueberries,
almost gone
the rain pretends to come
but no one cares
not even the cat
written july 31 — lughnasadh — feast of the grain harvest
Hammond Pond Reservation, Green Line crossing
For five extra minutes you follow the path
through mayapple, sarsaparilla and anxiety
over a little hill and through
what might be blueberry and poison ivy
with beech and oak and maple rustling overhead
to a pond, a flooded field really
and the curl of wind over its flat surface
and the beaten-down dried rushes
and a barrier of stones
upon which rests
a butterfly with black, gold-tipped wings
thirty seconds later, you turn to see
the Riverside Line cross,
two green trolleys
over the silent water
Mount Ida College Pond After Work Haiku
wind moving across the water
birdsong bullfrog
dragonfly chainsaw
when the chainsaw falls still
flash of red
against black wings
Fire and the Love Eye
fire destroys everything in its path
transforms it to ash
the love eye transforms
without destroying
Garden of Words 