Holy Blog: Sick/Six/[sic] Spring Poems

Here are some poemes from a poetry chapbook I made for my Poetry Workshop with the fabulous Michelle Valladares at City College.

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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.

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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.

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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.