The Note

Bring in rose, it said.

I looked at my note to myself from earlier in the day, and my mind said, Who is Rose?

Then my brain went searching and turned up an image of an old schizophrenic lady I'd once cared for at a psychiatric hospital. If Rose was going outside (or inside, for that matter), she first turned her raincoat completely inside and out. The coat was a must, in any weather. Her umbrella was a must too, and she dutifully opened and closed it three times before making her transition in or out.

You can imagine my surprise when my brain conjured up Rose and tried to parse the command to bring her in.

A moment later, I laughed out loud. Bring in rose!

I had bought a little red bush-rose way back on Valentine's Day, and I've been planning to transplant it outdoors. In an effort to tackle my GDD (Garden-Deficit Disorder), I'd tried to prepare the rose for a smooth transition from house life to yard life, by setting it outside in the daytime to get some sun, to "harden off," and to develop an immunity to the cat next door.

Unfortunately, the first day I did that, I forgot the rose and left it out all night. It only lost about a third of its leaves as a result.

To steel myself against further mishap, I penciled a reminder-note on the second day of my battle for the roses. Now I read the note again. Bring in rose. Why yes, I can do that, I thought. Though, for good measure, I considered opening and closing an old umbrella— as a charm to make sure we'll get red roses come June.

Before We Know Their Names

I wrote this for a friend whose child was in the hospital, and somehow it seems like the perfect poem for Mother's Day...

Ours

We call them to the world
before we even know their names,
before we understand
what it will mean
to lean beside their beds
on breath-thin nights.
They teach us how
to hold their hands,
shut the lights,
pray for dawn.


Got a Mother's Day poem to share? Join Random Acts of Poetry, to share your link and possibly be featured.

(Also sharing today with One Shot Wednesday.)

On, In, and Around Mondays: Do it Just Because

We drove to the store in her blue sports car with the white interior. She put the air conditioning on too high. It was the one thing we always quibbled over.

In the store, we chose fabric, lace, ribbon, thread. She loved to give me things I loved. She loved to help me learn.

This time it was an expensive sewing project that required pearl buttons, a complicated pattern, and fine trim. It was an outfit that I didn't need, and it was beautiful.

Twenty-nine years later, and my grandmother is gone.

There are those who say we should be careful about what we do, only work on that which serves the pressing needs of the world. There is not much room for flowered fabric and needless lace.

Today I sit in our Easter service, and I hold hands with my girl. I touch her cotton skirt and run my fingers over ivory lace. The very same.

Twenty-nine years later, and my girl is greeting Easter day in a skirt I only made for me—the gift of a grandmother who splurged, the work of young hands making beauty, just because. And how could I have known?


---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Questioning on Good Friday

Asking Joseph of Arimathea

Who of us
has not gone
away
stone-blind, sealed
to the thought
of another day
where wounds
would be closed as tight
as this tomb,
who of us
has remembered
to wait...
to stay.

---
Thanks Gordon, for inspiring me to this poem.

RELATED:
Mary Asked Martha

Can Cabbage Make You Write?

Today I am feeling the pressure of cabbage. Really, cabbage. The opaque vegetable reminds me of a fat baby-faced candle you keep peeling back, only to find it has no wick, just a ruffly heart that, at the last, clings to a core of root flesh and holds nothing but air.

It is not particularly in the nature of cabbage to pressure people who have too much to do and too much on their minds. Cabbages are rather humble things, yielding to knives for the sake of coleslaw and to peasant hands for a laying open to receive stuffings of onions, rice and ground beef.

Continue reading, at The Curator...


Painting by Linda Dallas, from Cover of Englewood Review of Books.

Finding the Poetry in Tea

I was reading about Betjeman and Barton's Polka Tea and discussing it with a friend. The catalog description just begged to be turned into a poem.

Makes me wonder how many catalogs have little poems in them, waiting to be extricated.

Morning Tea with Julie

Fruit, more fruit,
a real combination of fruit:
you and me,
on a subtle base of Ceylon and China teas—
cherry, strawberry,
peach and orange,
a whirl of flavour.
And. Outside our window,
scattered sunflower petals.

Post in honor of One Shot Wednesday.

On, In, and Around Mondays: Sharing the Mystery

I made a start, but I always seem to falter when it comes to fiction. She knows this about me.

"Did you ever finish?" she asked.

"I'm on chapter two."

"I can read it to you," she said.

And so she did, this weekend. On my bed. In the kitchen. On the deck at her grandparents' home.

Sometimes I would catch myself daydreaming. About work or bills. About taxes or my poets. Her voice never faltered. She laughed, sighed, caught my eye, touched my hand. Sometimes she turned to the back of the book or to the footnotes. "Chopin never wrote anything for solo violin, isn't that funny? I love these notes!"

Then she told me this is why Doyle didn't like the Holmes stories. They were inaccurate, unlike his other works which he spent far more time researching. But no one liked the other works much. Who cared about accuracy, when the Holmes stories were better?

I type these words and I suddenly wonder, "Was it taxes I daydreamed about, while my dark-haired girl shared her beloved Holmes with me? Or am I making that up? Did she really touch my hand? Or was it my arm? When we remember, we alter memories. We cannot know for sure what happened. Only approximations.

But I remember this, surely. Very surely. She took the time to read to me. I listened, I watched, and... we loved.

---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

On, In, and Around Mondays: Dragon Heels and Jewels

"What do I look good in?" she asked me.

We were picking through clothes at an upscale store where we wouldn't ever actually buy anything off the rack.

"You'd look good in anything," I told her. My older daughter has honey skin and long dark hair. She's on her way to being tall.

At a jewelry counter, we discussed how chunky the styles were. (I'd have to do a bit of weight lifting just to carry some of the pieces on my neck and wrists.) We'd handled $3,000.00 Parisian stilettos covered in rainbow jewels from the base of the heel to the top.

"No one can really bear those without hurting themselves," I told her.

"Dragons can handle it!" she said. "At night they come and wear the shoes when no one sees."

When we were rejoined by my Littlest and my husband, we went back to the shoes. My Littlest became the dragon and tried the shoe, her white cotton sock an odd contrast to French fashion. ("You break it, you buy it," pressed into my mind, and I pressed it back out.)

We took my little daughter's hands, so she could stand in the stiletto without falling. And we laughed.

A woman moved past us and remarked to me, "What a beautiful family you are."

And I felt bejeweled.


---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

How to Work Like a Genius

I walked into the dining room and gasped. Oh my, what a two-year-old can do in a brief space of time! While I'd been chopping, frying, and boiling, she'd been stringing, draping, and wrapping. The room looked like some kind of Picasso-bent spider had sneaked in to claim an opportunity at artistic re-engineering.

In the years since that messy dining room day, I've done my share of ill-parenting. But if there's one thing I think I may have gotten right, it's the issue of providing space—both physical and mental, for my daughters to be and do, create and laze, explore and abandon.

Sometimes I've doubted my methods. And as a home educator I've felt particularly pressured at times to prove that I'm not squandering my kids' days... Read the rest over at TheHighCalling.

Writing Forgiveness

Lenten

I am the hardest person
to forgive;
at night I lie
awake and count my faults,
keep them under my pillow
like hard candy, unwrapped
and stuck
with feathers.


Post in honor of One Shot Wednesday. Also, we're writing forgiveness poems at TheHighCalling. Join us, for links and possible feature.

On, In, and Around Mondays: Come Away

It is rainy this morning, and a big blue book of poems sits on the table. My girls and I have been reading together, just like we did last year, a poem a day for National Poetry Month.

I'm not sure how it came together, but somehow we've landed on Yeats and all things Irish.

I have read Yeats before, was required to in college, but I didn't read him like this. The section begins with a poem called "The Stolen Child" and I can hardly get the words out to my children...

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild,
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

My girls and I talk about this (me holding back tears). We talk about how there is a little bit of faery in every parent who wishes to shelter a child, to keep the child a forever-child. We talk about the end of the poem, where the stolen child goes away with the faeries, only to miss...

the calves on the warm hillside
or the kettle on the hob

It is a conversation for both of us— me and my girls: They, sometimes afraid to grow, preferring to be stolen away to the place where...

to and fro we leap
and chase the frothy bubbles
while the world is full of troubles

Me, wanting my girls to live in the place full of berries/And of reddest stolen cherries.

I touch the blue book of poems this morning, think of how my Eldest went off after the reading, to begin her own story of an Aisling who loses her blue ball in a stream pool and asks three children to help her retrieve it. They do, and in thanks she says, "I will give you a song."

She sat cross-legged on the ground with the ball on her lap and started to sing. She did not use words but an eerie wordless melody that seemed to fill the air and the stream...It was unbearably beautiful.

And I am still holding back tears.

---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...