the ugly earring

anniversary poem

later, you would shave your head. and i would trim the hair
on the nape of your neck. this notion of time, a passing year,
another we’ve made together.
you ask me – what sex is the baby.
but i don’t answer. instead, i tell you
it is okay for you to remarry when i die.
i see it in my face more than yours.
these gray roots and the lines around my mouth.
- she will have your eyes.

i woke up last night, and the porch light was on.
i swear i heard rain. a ghost reached for you.
and then i found you -
asleep between two daughters,
wearing an old sweater
i bought you years ago.

And then it was over, this world we had grown to love
for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses
and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities
while dreaming.

But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies
who needed milk and comforting, and someone
picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble
and began to sing about the light flutter

the kick beneath the skin of the earth
we felt there, beneath us

a warm animal
a song being born between the legs of her;
a poem.

image via old lawrence
joy harjo poem: when the world ended as we knew it

from: what love comes to: new and selected poems

ruth stone

___

“You are a lovely link

in the great chain of being

Think how lucky it is to be born.”

___

You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

painting: picasso’s seated nude woman
poem: remembering, rainer maria rilke

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.

i hold your hand,
first born.

this is how you know
i’ve memorized
the length of your fingers. and when
you’re biting your nails again.

she held my hand, too,
bending my fingers upward
at the knuckles.
Perhaps, she thought,
i would be a dancer
instead of the sparrow
that, one day, would flee
her nest.

image: here

She pays attention to the hair, not her fingers, and cuts herself
once or twice a day.   Doesn’t notice anymore, just if the blood
starts flowing.   Says, Excuse me, to the customer and walks away
for a band-aid.   Same spot on the middle finger over and over,
raised like a callus.   Also the nicks where she snips between
her fingers, the torn webbing.   Also spider veins on her legs now,
so ugly, though she sits in a chair for half of each cut, rolls around
from side to side.   At night in the winter she sleeps in white
cotton gloves, Neosporin on the cuts, vitamin E, then heavy
lotion.   All night, for weeks, her white hands lie clothed like
those of a young girl going to her first party.   Sleeping alone,
she opens and closes her long scissors and the hair falls under
her hands.   It’s a good living, kind of like an undertaker,
the people keep coming, and the hair, shoulder length, French
twist, braids.   Someone has to cut it.   At the end she whisks
and talcums my neck.   Only then can I bend and see my hair,
how it covers the floor, curls and clippings of brown and silver,
how it shines like a field of scythed hay beneath my feet.

poem: cutting hair by minnie bruce pratt
image: from the kumpfs family archive

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us

…

One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe
this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.

pieces from requiem by anna akhmatova
image:  here

Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe

but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever

poem: song for baby-o, unborn by diane di prima
image found here