Poem: My Missing Skin

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Seonaid

I think I left my skin somewhere.
How else to explain
This longing, yearning
To return to

the sea
the sky
the land

To crawl through the undergrowth
Belly-ground touching,
Scales tingling with
Anticipation

Oh, to eat

Unencumbered

To fly, knowing that

This is all there is!

To leap, fully alive,
From the depths and
come crashing down
All thirty glorious TONS of me!

Yes.
There must have been a skin lost.

Perhaps I left it up that tree,
Or in the glade where they
cornered me.
Humiliation has a way of causing
forgetting.

Maybe it is hiding in the corner of some playground,
Under a pile of leaves,
Trying to figure out the teasing
Rules. You, not you. Take
Three.
Big.
Steps.

I slip into it sometimes: one Perfect outfit.
Look into the mirror and sigh with
recognition. Ah, yes! That’s me.

Look at me there! Tall and glorious and
exuberant and loud.

How do we live our lives like this, in
skins two sizes too small? Always afraid of
Moving too fast,
Breathing too deeply,
Stretching too high for fear of

Splitting
The seams.

Filed under: Creative Writing, WorldView | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Poem: Hidden Knowledge

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Seonaid

Hidden Knowledge

In a clearing in the woods
On a cliff overlooking the ocean
In a cave in the mountains
Someone waits.

She has the answer you seek,
In the hut,
In the cottage,
In the cave

You would not notice her
If you passed her in the street.
She has mastered the art of
Blending In,
Along with a dozen other Wisdoms,
Both ancient and modern.

But if you seek her earnestly,
Let down your guard enough
to see through her drab glamour,
you will find her.

There, in her cottage, she will say,
Shuffling toward you
With the already-brewed pot,
“Yes, yes. I’ve been expecting you.
I have just the thing, over here.
Somewhere.
Give me a minute.”

She will tell you a Story as she
riffles through the books,
rambling, murmuring.
“No. Not quite the one.
Oh… I remember this… (staring off into the distance)
Ah, yes. Here it is.” (Tap, tap, tap…)

Listen to the story. You will need it
Later.

Filed under: Rural Living | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Another Poem

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Seonaid

I swear I will get back to prose some day. But the poems are waking me up. So I write them down.

Sometimes, The Wind

Sometimes when I leave my home
Triumphant,
With six things perfectly balanced,
The door is torn from my hand
And I rail.

The wind, the wind!

It is a character in our little dramas,
Played out at the hardware store,
Fingers tracing the lines
Of coveted outdoor objects.
But. The Wind. (he reminds me)
And dreams are left unpurchased,
Unbuilt, unfulfilled,
The trappings of another life.
One unconstrained by. All. This. Wind.

Resentment builds.

Later that day,
Gazing out upon the whitecaps at play
Upon the river,
Wondering in silence how long it will be before
we lose so many pieces of the roof that we can’t ignore it
any longer,
I ask,
“Is it the Mistral that is said to drive people
Mad?”
I know the answer.
It is not a new conversation.

“Yes,” he says,
And puts his arms around me from behind,
Gazing out upon
The whitecaps at play.

Filed under: Creative Writing, Rural Living | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

A Poem for Perspective

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Seonaid

The Dawn of Understanding (I Hope)

At the point of urgency,
The call to action,
When I Know that
Everything I’ve done until Now
Has been mere Preparation for this
Moment

It happens that I Stop.

And I realize that

Those moments of mere
Preparation, were
(in their time)
the Most Important Thing.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Poem: Grown-up School

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Seonaid

Grown-Up School

“I must have missed this day,”
I think,
Trying to coax sugar-water,
Peanut butter,
Mashed banana
into my daughter’s sick
Rat.

I think that, sometimes.

Maybe a sick day cost me
The essential knowledge of
How to find my Right Life,
Retrieve my missing Socks, or
Live with the consequences of

Breaking someone’s heart
To save my own.

But I’m glad I got the lessons on
Boosting a Car,
Knowing True Love when it finds you,
and
Easing a Seam.

Those have come in handy.

Along with
Making a White Sauce,
Balancing my Cheque Book and

Doing the Work before going out to Play.

Although I think

They might have been
(wrong)
about that last one.

Filed under: Creative Writing, Day-to-Day, WorldView | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Poem: By The Highway

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Seonaid

By The Highway

On the rock wall

Sheer,
Crazed, lined with vertical
scars

Remnants of the process
(designed, coldly)
by which tons of rock
ancient beyond reckoning
were blasted away

The bleary, beery
late night spray-job
echoes back the builders’
desperate
anonymous scrawl:

I was here.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Poem: When I Die

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Seonaid

Oddly enough, this was written in one of my better moods.

When I Die

Do not mark my passage with marble,
No.
Turn towards the light.

Do not hold my bones hostage
In iron and lead
Or cage my form in a chemical bath.

These atoms are not me.
Where I am going,
No body has been.

Donations can be made in my name,
I suppose,
But not to whatever killed me.

Give water to those who thirst,
Give food to those in need,
Give shelter to those who strive for warmth,
Give solace to the young who need it most.

If they have half the life I’ve led,
half the joy I’ve felt,
They will know the meaning.

Lay me to rest in some wood,
or other,
Or in a meadow of your choosing.
Let me run down to the sea,
Slowly, over a million years. Let me
Rejoin the bones of the earth.

Do not mark my passage with marble,
No.
Let me depart in mystery.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

Poem: Advice from the Inner Critic

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Seonaid

Advice from the Inner Critic

Love?!?

Love’s been done to death.
Nobody’s had anything new to say
In 60 generations.

And how do you plan to avoid
The cheese-traps,
Running mouse-like through
The maze of metaphors?

No. Best to steer clear,
Dance around the edges.

Leave love to the experts.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Poem: Liberation

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Seonaid

Cast off the shackles of belonging.

There is no You to hide from
There is only perfect knowledge

of Beauty and Truth

Cloaked in 7000 generations
of catastrophe

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Tummy Tucks

Posted on January 29, 2011 by Seonaid

The tummy.

Flatten your tummy.
Get rid of belly fat.
Get the abs you’ve always dreamed of.
With this one magic secret.

And if that doesn’t work,
And you’ve gone the way of the
10,000 sit ups and
One thousand and one pilates classes
And yoga just isn’t doing it for you,
And neither did the grapefruit diet
or the GI, or low-fat, low-carb, low-everything
(except time, effort, and cost)
There is always

The knife.

Or, when you find yourself perplexed by this extra flesh,
Patting yourself down in front of the mirror,
You could hear the love of your child’s voice,
The one who admires the soft tummy,
(Soft, even for a pillow)
Who falls asleep, tucked around the love, the soft
The belly from which zie came,
The belly and the child inextricably bound
After this time apart.

Filed under: Creative Writing | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

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