Tag: resiliency

some grow in shadow under snow

shaking off ice incidentally as
it forms to suffocate

any warmth—born into
the bones of their ancestors know,

to shiver in the cold. how

cracks in the dirt divide a world
where rains have run off steep slopes,
the way roots cannot reach another
through hardened places

just the long edge between us

like is the friend who came back to me
already gone and saying, goodbye

too late, evidence of something coming
i could not stop, the same

his mother said it was my fault

because i was his best friend and
my mom told me i did not love her

these small deaths—
i now have a petal that will not
open. from below snow, how

like my mother and her father
like my mother’s mother

who wrote secret books between
making lunch and shelling peas for dinner

pushing the binding to
undo later by another—i felt it

in the cool wind of giants some
neither too warm nor too unkind

driving to work, walking to school

laying upon the ground in a
puffy jacket beside me

and i am bare, until un-gripping
the hands that had to let me go,

the warmth of others burned
like a question buried.

***

a person cannot hold a
defining edge to trace the line

without falling far
being almost one and the same

on thin margins—born
flat-footed and dreamy if
like myself—and maybe

how i decided to just fall
on one side and then the other

sometimes almost too far, and
would stitch each part i found that fit

the best and the worst of things
within my knowledge like
peter pan with his shadow—

that kept trying to run.

maybe like this a person
can escape the bindings that

limit, or was it in seeing
the true face of my mother

a little broken but still beautiful
without the anger,

who tried to give me anything
but what she had been given

who removed her own leaves
to be free of memory—

and could not get enough of
the sun anymore,

until she was only a stem
unable to hold, and

would smile, a
little aggressively

even as she fell. she

did make my heart, too
same as my father taught me
the depth of warmth, and

the necessity of careful thinking

and i took this warmth
like a blanket for any i

might run into being half
a snowy flower, or would

curl up in my own mouth—
too sad to be still

and push

as i wanted for her, the way
she taught me to do

like i wished for my grandmother

and maybe even my grandfather
they called a monster.

***

i define now, on what some

might say is too soft an edge
of what is the truth and what

is a story we tell to make
the truth pretty like/

a flower, too small to be picked
placed in the vase forgotten
next to sunday’s paper

too unusual to be left alone

by those who would wear them
in their hair for a day or two

and what an adventure, how

through hard or powder snow
they keep pushing,

learning what is warm in
how hard they must shake

and the way light looks
a little dark beneath the layers,

and then suddenly, the sun.