Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 01, 2025

The sky flows towards 
upended kayaks resting
on the inlet shore.

Monday, September 29, 2025

Bookended by oaks
glowing sunset confection,
sweet sherbet colors.

Saturday, September 27, 2025

Lay Down Your Suffering

 Little Altars Everywhere

There are little altars everywhere
in the world, places where you can
lay down your suffering for a while.
Hollowed-out oak trunk by the forest trail
where you leave acorns and pine cones
and worries you’ve gathered on a cushion
of moss, whose patience softens everything.
Or the bench at the busy intersection
where streams of people crossing the street
parted around you, and you fell in love
with each of them—the men in suits, babies
strapped in strollers—and left your fear
crumpled there like a useless receipt.
Or the shelf where you keep the box
of your mother’s ashes next to an electric
candle that flickers day and night, how you
give your grief to the yellow glow of that
false flame over and over, knowing
that even the plainest of light can be
enough sometimes to hold your pain.

--James Crews

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Oh, Mother Morro!
Steadfast refuge for wildlife;
sacred ancient land.

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

In the black abyss
glorious color shifting
revealing a path.

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

A gondola skims
across the bay, ushering
the evening's peace.

Monday, August 25, 2025

Poem: A Therapy Hour

As a therapist, this reads true. It's not a script. For me, the poem evokes the essence of being a therapist, meeting whatever the client brings, staying present and authentic. Of course therapy also involves deeper responses, examinations of beliefs and thought patterns, skill practice.

Click to enlarge for better reading.

Monday, July 14, 2025

NPR Tiny Desk Contest 2023 - Andrea Gibson - MAGA HAT IN THE CHEMO ROOM

 
 
Andrea Gibson's brilliant force has departed their body. They were a beacon of courage and compassion communicated through poetry. I mourn our loss. May their brilliance and love manifest forever. 
 
 

Tuesday, July 01, 2025

Recognition

Recognition

Playing truth or dare an hour before daylight
among the bean trees, I encounter a stranger at the gate.
When I ask what she is doing, she replies,
"Composing a life." She seeks to answer the question,
"Is there no place on earth for me?"

I ask how she will know the answer, and she says
she will track her progress in the stone diaries.
She has an amazing grace, this girl with a pearl earring
wearing borrowed finery, and I want to know more.
I ask with an open heart, open mind, what it is she seeks.

She wants to understand the savage inequalities,
to have a reckoning with the fact that she lives
in a world where the poisonwood bible increasingly
becomes the rule of law. She wants to help people
to stop running with scissors and enjoy the perfection
of the morning.

We are surrounded by landscapes of wonder, if we
would only make the effort to see differently.

She in turn asks what I seek. I reply that I want
the courage to be, to cast a slender thread
of hope into the sea, the sea of humanity.
I want to plant new seeds of contemplation,
embrace the grace in dying. I want to
know the mystery of tying rocks to clouds.

From her angle of repose under oleander,
jacaranda, the magnificent spinster listens.
I tell her she has a beautiful mind, that
I can see the molecules of emotion swirling in her.
She tells me that I am a succulent wild woman,
that I have zen under a wing. She reminds me
that art is a way of knowing and solitude
a return to the self.

Then we part, blessing each other with traveling
mercies, with a promise to meet again
at the healing circle in Gilead.
                                               -Kathryn Harper



Thursday, June 26, 2025

She Said Hello

                                    She Said Hello

                                    She said 'Hello, I’m digging
                                    sand nests' and handed
                                    out shovels.

                                    Seagulls lurked nearby
                                    shouting manic laughter
                                    keeping an eye open
                                    for unattended food.

                                    Farther along the beach,
                                    six shrieking dervishes
                                    flirt with the water’s edge.

                                    And the kelp garlands
                                    strewn across rocks
                                    host a caucus of starlings.

                                                        -Kathryn Harper