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.
The Lettuce Again this summer I’ve forgotten to harvest the lettuce that we planted when the ground was barely workable, warm enough to support the tenderness of seedlings, brown, pale, and white, barely opening to the world, the air, the sun. We are still human, he tells me, even though I think that we may be losing whatever it is that makes humans human? Humanity seems a fickle word now that pundits use it to talk about the unfurling of threats, bombs, lies. The lettuce, when you forget to harvest, shoots up like it’s trying to reach the sky, but it rots from the outside and in towards the core, slowly taking over the joy of green, crisp leaves. We are like this. Everything greens and grows and rots when we aren’t looking. Democracies, romaine, bibb, souls, humanities. How can I forget to harvest the lettuce? Why do we plant it at all?
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 Summer Spliff by Broke for Free.
