They tiptoe around back,
velvet flanks broad,
flashes of cream tails,
not raised in alarm,
but wagging in whispers,
graceful necks dipping for moss
or lifting for leaves.
I nearly missed them,
these soft, silent, beauties.
Don’t you, too.
Keep an eye out for the
nearly silent beauty,
still nibbling away
at the underside of shade.
It’ll be what keeps us going,
keeps us lifted and searching,
ears twitching, feet pattering
toward goodness and mercy.
Find and follow the tender path.
There’s still softness to be found.
Ah, the heady, slow tempo,the sonnet of June --
with summer stretched out in a languorous tune,
her notes sweetly pedaled and perfumed with sighs,
she vows lazy mornings and evenings sublime.
With a go-nowhere-fast song, she’s pool-water chill,
for screen-porch rain listening and napping your fill.
Crack open the book spines, the bottles of wine,
and relish her at-ease, adagio time.
Wake up to slow measures, dipped silver with dew,
as deer tap staccato while tiptoeing through.
At dusk, come the cymbals in lightning bug sets
of quivering selfies that make you forget
next month, bringing emails with pre-planning news,
and all the bleak back-to-school rhythm and blues.
When spring drops at the flick of the world’s wrist,
and colors whirl in kaleidoscopic,
impressionistic hues with views
of greens gold as the pond powdered with pollen,
and golds green as the glittering hummingbird’s back,
buds bursting with hard candy
sprinkled from sky’s blue gingham pockets,
breast quivering, shimmering
inside her seasonal tenses,
presently accounting for
all this grandeur,
speckled and freckled and stippled,
like the nippled branches of trees
unfurling their ribbons of leaves
tasting like Snapple green apple,
like lemon-lime soda,
like absinthe in Paris
in the springtime, I fancy
all the world’s a-fizz
with fuzzy wings buzzing
with gossip, with bird call,
with the dapple and babble
of dawn.
And I’m here,
bearing witness
to the many-splendored blessings
from which this morning flows.
Seems about right,
this new walking fad comes to light
during the apocalyptic second term
of a cult leader ready to burn
all semblance of normalcy,
of decency, of democracy—
his policy driven by bended knee
to the almighty dollar,
his minions donning loyalty collars,
lapping up his Kool-Aid
praising every tirade,
every military parade,
banishment of any aid,
both foreign and domestic
as they bow and genuflect.
You’ll know them by their
orange passion and flair,
their unabashed disdain -
insane rage - for the sage
value of any initiative,
or presumed derivative,
involving social diversity,
inclusion and equity,
and any sort of empathy.
They silence other voices,
take away choices,
arrest and deport,
rewrite history, report
falsities, deny science,
are completely defiant
of research,
disbelieving the experts
in favor of the perverts
of justice and truth
with their sawtooth
smiles and weaponized wiles.
They blaspheme and defame,
shame and blame the women
among us, denigrate the more-melanined
among us, belittle the neuro-divergent
among us, arrest the daring outspoken
among us, fire those who dare protest
among us, infiltrate the most sensitive
information about us.
Sheep carcasses are strewn
from Wall Street to the White House lawn,
as his followers applaud
the “gets worse before it gets better” lore.
Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor
get whiplash trying to wrap their heads around
the crumbs tossed to the ground
from the wealthiest of these pockets,
holding onto the promise -- a return to greatness
to antiquatedness, to the adulterated-ness
of a lesser democracy, when liberty wasn’t free
for all of us.
Back to the times and crimes
and political climes
of bleeding women dying in back streets
and strange fruit hanging on southern trees.
But stories like these are lambasted,
then categorically blasted
from statue placards
and archival records,
from websites and libraries
naval academies,
elementary, middle and secondary schools
for everyone must follow his rules
or lose funding or worse
in this insanely alternate universe
we find ourselves in –
as impossible to comprehend
as me finding time to bend
60 minutes of walk time
at 6 in the morning or 6 at night
in my chaotic scene
of kids and work and chasing dreams.
As impossible to believe
as a nation that would take leave
of its senses to follow its leader/redeemer,
who loves wealth and self, is a schemer
a hyperbolic screamer,
a traitor, manipulator,
a tyrant,
aberrant
idiot, and absolute,
insufferable bore.
So Resist this anti-democracy,
anti-christ-like
blaspheming orange aberration,
I challenge you.
Resist him, I beg you.
Resist him – today.
Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
--Yann Martel, Life of Pi
we lug our guts around in our bag of bones
and being
a ticking tangle of purpose and futility,
we seek to make magic of the mincemeat
we’ve been served,
to make art of our existence
before it’s gone too soon
gone to ruin
our dance with life
a composition
ending
in death
where decomposition
takes the final bow
meanwhile, the masters behind
like the masters before
the masters like us
break
bread over the bodies
of work we leave behind,
our dusty rewards raked together
in studied elegies
of the rise and fall
of form and function,
the composition
of the naked ambition
of all who came
and saw
and were conquered
before
begging,
more please my mentors
more please for me.
Yes, the world whispers in watercolor sighs
through lemon-lime tree tops and songbirds in flight,
through apricot patchwork and tangerine glow,
she softly persuades me I’ve nowhere to go.
I bow to her whimsy, take shade-sprinkled paths,
leave briefcase discarded and footwear off-cast
take dappled indulgences, sun-skittled treats,
while light couples shadow, I follow the beats
of finches’ wings and bold insect song,
of cobbled trail and moss-laden lawn,
‘til a whisper of Wordsworth I feel at my ear,
melancholy Keats through the brush of a tear.
Shelley’s sublime catches fire in my rib,
but mostly its Oliver’s procreant crib
that justly uproots me
with riotous sound
head spinning, knock-kneed
I’m lost, then I’m found
by wind in the willows,
birds whistling spondee,
fuzz-bodied pollen thieves
humming off-key
tickling each stamen in
ramshackle weeds,
staining, sustaining
life down on their knees.
each citrus sweet moment,
kaleidoscope framed,
now central components
fused deep in my brain
for when the time comes –
when from depths I will plumb
the sensory memories
now blooming in me
the pigments of poetry
stirring inside
straining, complaining
to bring them to life.
are many manuscripts
just bursting at the seams,
many spellbound magic books
for healing broken things
aged, patinaed, patched and frayed,
still sitting on the shelf
some come loose, some pinned with twine
but all chock full of wealth.
with charms to gall an adder’s sting
to root out poison, rot
engendered by the canon always
leaning for its shot.
halfcocked, they aim their leather spines
at us, our Magic Place
that burns, bewitches, weakens them
they call us a disgrace.
they disregard our wisdom
and our sage and studied views,
claim we know not what we say,
discount us as confused.
in truth, they're sore afraid of us,
our planet and our stars,
our bodies, hearts, and most, our minds,
our endless reservoirs.
our mother's shelves hold manuscripts
some old and well-worn songs
to rattle out the many truths
and right the many wrongs.
so light the fire, put pots to boil,
then toil and twist and throw
a list of all the loathsome trolls
make thick their gruel of woe
remind them there’s a place for us,
we have the right and might
to bring them down to rubble dust
we've just begun to fight.
Heather Peters Candela
I saw our family’s matriarch this week.
Spent a night and afternoon bathed in her love.
Watched as she delivered candy heart grapes
and chocolate chip cookies to attendants
where her husband now resides –my uncle,
but no more like my uncle than I am
to Hercules, so bent and gnarled is he,
a Joshua Tree inside the endless
pale expanse of his nursing home walls.
We signed the guest book where her name repeats
uninterrupted and boundless in the
otherwise bare pages, her Palmer-Method
perfect loops and whorls as precise as the
fingerprint of her love on him, on me,
on all blessed to call her kin and more than kind.
Hearts as good
as grits and gravy,
passions that run
like over-easy eggs,
my first block class
of seniors
is a heaping helping
of Heaven Help
with a whole lotta
Gotta love ‘em
thrown in too.
Scattered, smothered,
and covered up –
that’s what they keep me –
along with on my toes
and on my No’s,
but oh-so-many
Yes-es, too.
We should all be
this way, their way,
full of pushing ourselves
and our limits,
pouring our magic
into this, our magic hour
in this wild and precious world.
We should all be grabbing our minutes
by the forkfuls, the spoonfuls, the plate and bowl and platterfuls,
with hearts as good as grits and gravy, passions spilling off the edges
like
over-easy
eggs.
Before the grit
and grave
overtake us all.
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