Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
For Anne & Maxine
Why is it that the dead
Never listen to my pillow talk?
I am tired, but can’t sleep
Again and again and again.
You snore next to me
And occasionally twitch
As the dog snuggles in between us,
Released from her crate
Because she cries so much.
Again and again and again,
Why is that my whines
Never wake anyone up?
Not even myself.
When Your Father Isn’t Your Father
This morning when I planted
An apple tree in the backyard again
Because the last had been crushed
By the weight of beaten maple branches, broken fence posts
That had separated our yard
From the neighbor’s barren grass,
Until a storm knocked everything over,
Breaking, breaking, breaking,
I thought of you planting spruces
Wherever you lived, whenever you lived.
Delighting in shaping them
Into proper silhouettes, you’d said,
“Even Santa would approve of these big boys.”
You and I are not blood it turns out because Mom
Got lonely, bored, needy, got something. You never knew.
Firefighter lungs took you away before I learned,
Particulates turning into cancer all around your thick, hobbit chest.
Invading. Invading. Invading. Taking away
What seemed so solid and true.
You told me trees talked to other trees,
Anchored each other into the ground,
Talked to humans, too. Their species
Classification didn’t matter, you said.
It didn’t matter if they weren’t alike.
Maple could love oak could love spruce could love apple
The same way I could love you even when our blood
Turned out not to be the same. We still grew together.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
