Here are some poemes from a poetry chapbook I made for my Poetry Workshop with the fabulous Michelle Valladares at City College.
Dark One/God is With Us
This is paradise. All women are beautiful.
Goddesses. The flowers are singing.
My brother took a vow of silence.
Serene, he lay on the lawn, blanketed by snow.
In Spring he rose with snowdrops.
Through the fence, children saw him
naked, singing, hanging hedgehogs
in the hedge, where they belonged.
Police, doctors, handcuffed, took him away.
Absconded, my mother hid him above the garage
to save him from prison. Better
than hospital, restrained like an animal.
Don’t burn your golden throne, mother,
Keep your crown. Always.
Spring, never come again.
Its banks broken, the river
floods the field until horses
depart on motorboats.
My mother wants to see swans
fill the empty
horse-shaped spaces.
But nothing fits.
The field-lake shimmers
under storm-charred sky.
She always wanted to live by water.
Yellow-coated men offered evacuation.
But she liked seeing swans
where rabbits and voles once lived,
now swalllowed by the sea.
Home
Where birds woke me at dawn with their sweet, needling tones,
where scarlet peonies and roses like flames coaxed me out,
where grandfather oaks whispered, with restless leaves,
as my grandmother’s body under a blanket left the gates.
Home, where my mother never cried, not even when my brother
lay motionless on the lawn, blanketed by fluffy white snow,
where doctors manhandled my mother’s body for vital signs.
Once it had such value. She remembers being loved.
Home, where my mother lies in bed, her voice crumbling
into dust, like plaster beside the damp-silenced piano,
her lungs gasping. It would be so easy,
she says, to just. Let. Go.
Home, where the noisy robin and the mute white cat
visit daily, while I do not. She is glad
her mother never had to be alone, like this.
But I am not strong enough to stay, at home.