Soak in the bath of pain you
Who brought them

Crushing

its vocabulary of slander
to we with whom you wake
each day

severed limbs of children

Tongues lay spent

Cries To Allah from the
dying Faithful.  

God is good who pray
amidst the betrayed
lay slathered in the
fields of liars.

Who takes  away the good
of this world
while
we

pray

that the sons of betrayal
hang

Hearing  

bombs backfire.

Lives lost is a
dried sand sounds
of choking
down the

*****

Of lies whose brother
Truth

Is Betrayed.


Caroline Shank
April 4, 2025

It has been so sickly
Written, so
slidlingly

Redundant

said

that one is born to
in
the night of

Souls.

The dark triggers the time,
the weather and the
style
of the

Agreement.

The  is a
familiar Address.

Shutters close and
the dressings

notes the time.

Midnight is a fools
Game.

Sleep
Dulls the material.

You are unlikely
to call for, Toast
to

Love.

I watch As stars
Rapel down

sliding,
you so
carefully

placed to keep
out
Songs and poems
that lure

these lonely thoughts
Slipping on
the tears

of your

Indifference.



Caroline Shank
April 2, 2025

To wait

To wait is to be suspended
On a slender thought.

Not gossamer but iridescence's

Shines.

Your face in the morning

Wet

Slowly the question asks
will
you?

The days and years lie in
rubble

Tomorrow's dust
degenerates,

Yesterday's
bleed from the
pain of unuse.

To wait is a crowded cellar,
sour wines,

You and your
sapiosexual
5 th act.

It  is
Another dead end

itself that

staines the
floors of
Cellar

silences



Caroline Shank
March 30, 2025

Does anyone know

Really

That the ends of life are….
Rattled with dried

Labors

Notes left to oneself
Be true
Good

Play dead.Suffer little children.
Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow

Suffering into the light
Heal
The last time was so close.

I don't write what you want.

when I was young
Is a song.

I, however, a l …am a broken slab.
A well of  drenched
marinade.

You could save me

Yet…you

Fold my poetry over
Into

Daylight’s

Hampers.

Wherein I  lie.
Crimped
edges of a

Masterpiece


Caroline Shank
March 25, 2025

I was brilig in my slothy
days,
My combs dangled in the
fullness of ⁷time.

No particular fell but
were crushed.

I murmured to the sky's
yellow parts, home
of the slippery
curved words.

I walked the gel of
yesterday until &
therefore the ,,,,

Last lost number
was my age

A ziggy
On our

Love's shipped

trembling tune.

We

Kissed in the
fullness
and in the
ripeness

Of God's

Embrace.


Caroline Shank
MARCH 18, 20÷

What is the sound of one
Love tearing, the sound of
one heart breaking?

The song of love lies
crying
into the wrinkle of sheets.

Sing with me!
songs in the fire,
sparks of crackle and sprawl
Crawl
to you,
~~.to the fields where
dreams are
children. Our

Oyʻoozed
monument

Pleas to God for

Yesterday


Caroline Shank
3.16.2025


..

Look Around

The sky is melting  not falling
as has been

mentioned earlier.
Your notes are Incomplete.

Tomorrow the Ether will roll
out a tapestry of your life..
The colors are[

posies of opinions like chameleons

peering

into adolescent
Misunderstanding

standing In a corn field
looking around

Find a body and your
touch can

Spread the stain of

Un
Opinions applied with a
gravelled voice.

Shout  back…

“Blow it out your ***.”


Caroline Shank
March, 14, 2019

It's early morning and I
spend this time of colors
brightening and sounds
resonating.

Of plans still shaking
off the dew which overnight
brought life to tomorrow.

You are
kisses reflected on my
waiting tears. With hugs
waiting in my arms

for you.

The Pleasure of this are the
moment radicalized.  I
will never let you go.

Parades of Angels
pass over me.  Send
your music.
.
Test me not too long
alone  Beauty is
Loves indulgence.
Time is

Layers against
Our bodies, warm with

Each other

Rainbowed


Caroline Shank
March 8  2025
..

'There is, at midnight, a swoosh,
a backward sound
unheard at 6 o'clock.
Time licks the moment,
the bells, the knock on
tomorrow.  

We amaze
as dawn asks for its
audience and our last
guesses fade into
today.  

Nascent trails
of memories rise and
fall

into the rescue mission
the sunlight brings on
feet of clod.

It will be a day of reaching
into the pocket of love
newly incarnate.  

You
receive me.

Caroline Shank
March 3, 2025

.C.'Blue is not my favorite
color.

Circles of sapphire
worn by /
11/lonely

women

Whose husband's memory
Failed with
yesterday's
sports scores.

Break my heart  with temptation.


I will love you no matter
what .


Caroline Shank
March 2. 2025

It's the wanting you  
The wanting your mornings, and days each wi t h their
own nights .  The Syllables
of weeks each a territory
whose river's song, the blues
of which I lay me down
now to pray for tonight's voyage


Caroline Shank
February 24  2025

rooms are full.

There is time enough.

Time to move in.

I can see theeRo9m
other end of

tomorrow,

when the door to
you is open
and the end of time

itself.
beats


In your face. Your
blue eyes are
the
Signature
of our

Love.

We are emblazoned.

   Our existence,

in our faces reflect
on my own.

Our
blue eyes
move into

Tomorrow


Caroline Shank
February 22, 2025

The numbers of sin’z
scales written ,
of
her inequities is
like bells on
Christmas
morning.

Never silent She (I)

is
capable
of great

misunderstandings.

Tomorrow's multiplying
the rotations
around the

streetlamp.
Kids we were singing
And cLapping

Every time today is
crumpled.

Lights on the ground.

Not forever (me)
Again.

Sing a song of
Six
pence

inevitably.

And she died of
bleach.
Scrubbing Hands burn.

He left on a
weekday.

Today
when I was
Young.

Tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow

was a play

after all.



Caroline Shank
2.18.2025

50 years


ago, full of the
Righteousness of God.

He

?
who held my place
while insanity

With torn dreams, the
miasmas of lost love.

Bless me Father
you who showed
the ways to Hell

Baptizet me
Again.

The midnight (sirens
are lapping.
I stumble from
the drink of happiness

spilled on the sands.

You whose conscious is
trifled with like the fish
on the line

I eat
my disappointment

cold


Caroline Shank
Valentine's Day
   2025



Caroline Shank
2.14..2025

I am not a kind person

At times
I trickle interest in what
you are saying.

Mostly
I wait for
noon on a hot
day.

The breath of a
thousand words
cannot reach

the craters of
stones dug
without care.

I am not a kind person.

Where you were,
dying,
it was
the nurses who
compassioned you.

My reflection was
hidden in the
still pool of your and

leaving brown eyes.

I reek with sadness,
with the
penance of being

alone.



Caroline Shank
10.8.2022

Remember Me

Light is falling through the
Sleeves of my longing.

That's pretty good.  You
take me into the grotte
of imagination.  You

Nudge me
And I grapple with the
silence of rhymes.

Long was the life
time spent in the

whorle of loving.

The verbs I write
at all in the shadow where
my desk rests on the
faux brick wall are quiet

against the window curtain.

And I breathe.

Not all poetry calls you to
me as Sara writes. It's
the literature of my life

as I walk alone on the
beach where we stood

and Kissed that last
Night

The waves off Sarasota
splashed against us

The gulls screeched.

Taps sounded in the
night’s wind..

And I am fragile. I
sleep late and stay
out of the sun.

You may remember my
face.  

My stumble.

The last morning of

the

World.


Caroline Shank
February 12, 2025

Whispers

She whispers in his ear
of the love grown so long
out of the shelter.  

She says
how much she loves him.

He hears the
trumpets,

God's voice.



Caroline Shank
2.6.2025

Who are you to take my
Life
between
your drive to
change the landscape?

Do you unholy man seek to
save me? Are you constant
and believing in the Rightness

of your sanctimony?

For What is your Purpose?

You misunderstand my wrath.

Not in this world are you

Anymore

The mute destructive act
was not from caring sprung.

But

from the tongue you spit
Out

the ordinance

of my destruction.


Be out of my Poetry

Forever.

Forgotten



Caroline Shank
January 29, 2025

I have pages of prayers.
assimilated.  I saw them
yesterday.
I've
Clipped them together
with a
yellow butterfly.

Some
I wrote myself.

On nights I would
sit reading, lonely.
Days there,
were~~ sounds

remembered,~~
of music
coming always
from a farther room.

I meditate.  I fly off
to places where we
made love long ago.

You were love's young
dream.  I, a reflection.
always,the Other
side, a mirror's
back.
~~
Unreflected.

Incomprehensible.

A dichotomy
interrupted.


Caroline Shank
January 25, 2025

Depression lurks, stalks.
My woods are deep to
hide these creatures
from

You.

I have no season.

No respite.

You will never know that
my life is not well lived.

I have you to bless my
days and none to bless
my nights.

Tomorrow's go away before
they reach me.  I'm am
eternally present.

My group would scold me.
All is only eternally

present.

Irrevocably trapped in
Unforgiveness,

I sluff off your kindness
as I am tired in the mud
of my conscious
observations.

You will risk nothing
in loving  me. I am
not there.

This poem is itself
Ungrateful, under
the sun of no light.

The paradox of your
love is to me

the vehicle that will
take me to you

fully  in love.


Caroline Shank
January 21, 2024

Forgiveness (2013)


I learned as a young young girl that there are things that are unforgivable, things that are inconceivable, except that they happened.  I learned that
no one cares
whether or not you forgive them, or her, or him.  Forgiveness is a NON issue, actually.

Life moves on, with or without our sorrows or bitternesses.  It just moves on.  We go with it, unless we choose not to.  Should we choose the "absurd" path of going on with it, it still makes no difference whether or not we "forgive".

Forgiveness is for God, whatever your relationship is to God.  Our job is to reach through the minutes of our days and to be the best or kindest, or not. There is no choice but  to "fare forth".  The pain of abuse or insult rides with us.  It just does. It's where we go with it that makes us, breaks us, or takes us on our way.  We become our best idea of ourselves because we know the difference.  All learning is from analogy.  If someone hurts me, do I not bleed (etc.).  Do I not know how to BE in this world with kindnesses because I have known cruelty?  Of course I do.

I have known extraordinary kindness and love.  I have known these things when I have least deserved them.  I learned how to love from the amazing love which has been shown me.  I have known Gratitude and it is the Mantra of my life in my last act.

Deception, in whatever its form, cannot cut us, unless it matters so much we are willing to dwell in some mire of useless opinions.  What is important to me is contained in a really quite small circle.  "The rest is not my business."   T.S. Eliot.

It is irrelevant, this idea we have about "forgiveness".  It's arrogance in extremis.   If someone causes me pain I really cannot do anything about it except to remove the source of it.

I am, beyond belief sorry for the pain I have caused others.   All I can do is fall on my knees in gratitude that the next minute or hour has pushed me into the next minute or hour and if I hang onto God I will go into the next flowing parcel of time with wounds that are healing, with sores that, Thank God, show me the direction in which to go to find, again, a place of peace,
people who do love me and whom I love.  
I have lived to know many many Blessings and Gifts.  (If I had waited to feel "forgiven" I would still be mired in pain.  It is the gift of Acceptance, unconditional Acceptance which sustains me.)

Grace is not found in concepts like "forgiveness" but in the constant acts of love.

It is not my place to Judge.  God knows this.  He most surely does

Bored little girl so long ago.
Red Keds and a sailor's
hat.

The roses grew by the
door.  Mother
didn't notice the lacey

frill of their demise.

Or hers.  The summer
of the song was hot.

Lions.  Teenagers fit
full of ***** and
Kent cigarettes.

There she sits behind
the school gym.  The
player piano

accompanying

the tap tap of the
ash.

Fourteen was a sepsis.

Was, was.  Was.
A heartbeat of
dark nights, taunts

gone wild.

Memories in the mind
now so
Long
Ago.

She sits still, her
pleas for please

to let go.

To my 78th summer
wires of time twine

before the tunes
played

Long ago still
fresh as the summer
behind the empty

school.
Over and over.

Plagues are breathing
still

In the wrinkles of

My

Memory


Caroline Shank
January 19, 2025

Grace

is breathed.

Life sustained,

without asking.

Today is Thanks

For you

The last time I saw
you
in blue jeans

walk toward
me

The Dove of God

Arriving.

Saecula Saeculorum


Caroline Shank
1.17.2025

I Cry

I cry for the new babies.  They
havA thrill for living.

From so small hands the
DAY is channeld.
Tomorrow has not

Yet

determined  the posture
of tomorrow

Tomorrow that will suffer
of Blue Skies and questions.
Long after the rules are

set like spoons
to drunken rules.

I cry for tomorrows
hidden like doors
the feral cats use


No work of small hands
can stop the

Guns.


Caroline Shank
January 9, 2025

Tell me


again about flush toilets and hot
water.

I want you to keep it up,  I
sit and sit and “think about

it.
How good my life is.
.
Tell Me stuff of legends.
How God is good.

How love is to one's soul
as rain helps the Garden
    Grow.

Beat It into my failing
feeling.  The heart is
only prescribed to the



Foolish.

Tell Me Again


Tell me to stop weakening
with each flash of you.
Each belly flop of

your caring.

My turn at sublimation
leaves tears on my vocabulary.

To be Wise for you  is to be
as the lonely clef

under songs.

Daylight drives me cold
into

the
Lonely

Night


Caroline Shank
January 9, 2025

My friend is gone,a way of
leaving, mirrors October.
    
A warning salvo is flat footed

against the failure to bond,
     A Bottle slips.

The Brandy puddles.

Where have all my

  flowers

gone?  Never a breath, never
a sigh even.

My Old is withered.
to wrong turns.
  To those who read
the magazines.

I persevere
the unwritten
untold.

There is Now.

The failure of laughter
at my expense.

I cry unheard.

The Silence.


.
Caroline Shank
January 8. 2025!


~~

She tripped over you in a
final wave of surrender.

You said
   meet me where

The white cloth waves

in the air,
today's laundry.

Time's stretch limp

       unworn

clock’s hands.

Future stopped in the
U.nticking

The lie in bleach is

rinsed .

Love lives in the

shadow....

Tomorrow.will be
a
      concept

w.rapped in a

fantasy.


Caroline Shank
January 4, 2025

Mother did you know I would
grow old alone?

That the crevices on my
face fell into the street

with used syllables?

Tomorrow you said
No
To my first boyfriend.

Mother did you know I
wouldn't care. Your scarred

breast
was not my fault.

The trail of your
Epithet does not hurt
As much as this

Old age
When you
tried to

sell me


Caroline Shank
12.24.2024

You asked me if I had
     Written
a poem today?

No I said.  You could not
have known that you are

     my poem.

My metaphors have changed.
You took my sad attempt’
'
to make of my life

     a story someone might
read, even for a moment.
Tonight I can tell you

     You are the meter
which steers the thing
I call love.

An unusual poem, filled
with all the things you are.

So I will know you when
     finally
we are met
and One.  

Caroline Shank
December 17. 2024

For Kinik

It's as if my life was a package forgotten on the side

of a back road.

The chance of being plucked out and found even interesting,

unconcerned.

The name addressed to Hell.


Battered by lifes footballs
the sunscorched wrapping illegible.
To love so much the
Contents arrive in Hell.
Go on. I am not done with you

So says the
Call of the Universe.
Your tears are large.
The last of my life.
I won't go on. I will
stumble through

the bramble and thistles.

You saved me once
when I believed

In a destiny.
For such a short time

No
chance of being plucked out and found even interesting, unconcerned.
The name addressed to Hell.

Battered by lifes footballs the sunscorched wrapping illegible.
To love so much the
Contents arrive in Hell.

Go on. I am not done with you
So says the

Call of the Universe.
Your tears are large.
The last of my life.
I won't go on. I will
stumble through the bramble and thistles.
You saved me once when I believed
In a destiny.


For such a short time.

Caroline Shank

Is there a line in the
lives of you and me

which

when Crossed is like
the Rubicon?

Is it when
stumbled and
bruised

the phone
dangles,
held by conversation

that one is compelled
to wonder did I say
too much?

Love newly turned
there in the lathe
of indecision

‘Cannot bear
very much

Realty.

Mr Eliot talks of
lonely people.

Do I dare to Believe
That in you
is

Grace.  You shelter
Me.

Love lives after all.

Speculation saeculorem.


Caroline Shank
December 11, 2024

I have a lot of stories but you are the truth

Faces in the dark.
All the same now

I rode the years with paper wings
The songs changed but the men didnt

I was along a dark path. Looked for the light

Strangers even after I should have stopped the wrestling

There Was only this
today
a perplex of pain and
searching.

You are my Knight of
Shining

The days of pain are
behind the trail of
memories.

You are my wind
and my salvation.

I Honor you.


Caroline Shank
December 10, 2024

That's the way the cards
were dealt.

You on the other side
of the planet, me here
underneath
the subterranean
wheel of my mother's
lousy
life.

Her abuse,
the sins of her
violence.

wrap her voice around
my memories.  

There she is now,
aboard the ageing Ship
Caroline, docked
down by the stones on the

cobblestone
   of dreams.  

Look
my darling,

another love
slips
away


Caroline Shank
11.25.2025

Tomorrow creeps in its own
******* way to the last syllable
of recorded time.

It is this that worries me,
the notes i will write
around the corner..
Those metaphors that

wait

for me when love is
not there.

There are witches too
and chants.

Walk with me into the
copse

Save me my love.

Caroline Shank
11.20.2024

I'm going now,
you can call me
at the number
here.

I am one with the
once me never
again remembered.

I'm the mother, the
grandmother and
the, now, widow.

Whoever said i should
give thanks left no
calling card.

No hello, no goodbye,.

Buddha, he of no
regrets, spent his
life ignoring the pain

of even the women.

He did not say give
thanks, he said be
still.  For eight
years he sat.

Christ said He was
not of this world, so
no wisdom from
the Christian Miracle
of the World.  He is not
talking to me now.

The Rabbi stays alone
In a Shtetl, or however
it is spelled.

I lived sans companion,
no being to give me
permission to inhabit
this or any body.

My music
was lost. I played songs
over your name.
I dont know what
that means
My love.

I  lay in
this tangle of
placques
and convolutions

on the grass
of your words.

You tell me
now

that love always

was your

Song.



Caroline Shank
11.8.2024

My soul must be reincarnate.

Once upon a time, to wit,
in the past,  l was a
prisoner of lost love’s
leer.

Time was
A gun shot through my
dreams.

Yet still i love.

Again.

Love once
collapsed.

You called me.

My smile

unwrinkled.



Caroline Shank
11.8.2024
.

Cruel is the silence after.
the love goes.
The nights when the
breeze

freezes and the frogs
lose their croak.

Silence like the stillness
  of a child's bare footed
  climb into our bed.

Midnight is the silence
     after the rain goes.

I touch the silence with
      my mind.  I map the
      road  to a

tomorrow I don't want,
never asked for.  

The place is quiet.
      There was a stop
       a ways back.

You left me by the Willow.
       I couldn't call your name

You left me by the sand dune.
       and when I looked back

you never saw me

again.


Caroline Shank
11.03.2024

I cried because I'm old.
You said age is just a number.
I cried because I'm ugly,
Age has collapsed me, taken
     from me the looks of
     interest.
I cried because the end is near.

You have given me the looks
my soul seeks.

I cry now because you are
     far away.

“You Raise Me Up” plays
     on my heart.

There are tears of longing’s
     frustration
now until you happily walk
     off the plane
  
  toward our life.

when we will sing
     together happily

in
  
   God's Grace.


Caroline Shank
11.3.2024

Reflections
Those whose singular licks
of love grow aged and
Holy in the light of old
memories,


whose hands trace
lines on her body
in the grooves and
branches of the


forgotten, laden
with the names of
the unborn possibilities
call me in the night.


I am the listener who
Never sleeps.
I have my own stories
which trouble my pen
to widen the nights


of loss, you, and the
dreams of my


Old


Age






Caroline Shank
11.1.2024

Raw is when I scrape my
bare knee.  While the curl of a
bleeding bone can be seen
in bas relief beneath the
red blanket of the aid
worker.

Will a bandaid help?

I think about the war, well
any war.  The rude smears
of blood, the silence that
carries voices across
continents.  Television
surpasses even what

my imagination imagines.
I think about you in the
doorway to the aid station.

The world according to
CNN.  Children's screams
form a sound blanket
over which you must
scream just to hear

your many secret sounds.

Secret for the breadth it
takes

to reach your caring
embrace.

I want to die in your arms.
If I have to fight for the

Singular look of a love

No one can

damage

I Will.



Caroline Shank
10.30.2024


.

When the Universe lies
once

the vellum
of the Book of Life

fades.

The ink (always there is
Ink)

Sours.

You are my Page ;
play me.

You are the

Voice in my sleep.

Crying.


Caroline Shank
10.26.2024













⁹)

I am an American woman.
Rough and oddly strange.
I rebel against Dandelions,
I celebrate the omnipresent
Ladybug assault every year.

My age is irrelevant.  The
patterns in the gardens
of thought are my friends.

Some of the night’s whinning
winds wake me before
I remember you.

Time slaughters thought.
No syllables amount to
clarity of forgiveness.

I am an American woman.
I cry in private places you
know nothing about.

My God is still overseas.
In time the laws of
Harmony

will send you

also

Home.

And what will you do
with me then?

I am an American woman.
Here are my credentials…

Don't just walk on the
pages where it talks
about me.

Briefly.


Caroline Shank
Was here.
October 25, 2024

!.

Dark Matter


What if love itself were a dark
hole?  Love is blind is
a metaphor for the unloved
to concentrate on.

The lucky rabbit’s foot that
saved creation.

Birth and Rebirth

into the density
where we who love each
other

do things in which dream’s
direct the play.

There is no escape from
the known only world in
whose pulses we frolic.

Tomorrow is.
random.
beats

in a soundless
Universe.

Only to have
reality served

cold.

Caroline Shank
10.23.2024

There is still the rocking of
decisions amidst the myriad
daily tasks of which the
true label’s my conversation .

If Macbeth is the analogy
du jure no doubt the
witches will once again
sing the single syllable
their vocabulary utters.

I toil while the firelight remains.
The maps of my skin are
particular, I choose you.

Skies clear deep blue ever
present in the unsleep
washing over the signature’s
toes, I go on.  The petty
pace of time like the
seasons regurgitating

****** reasons goes on.


Never before has the
changed Bible paused in
it's slouching toward
Bethlehem.

“I have seen the eternal
footman snicker

and in short,
       I was afraid.”


Caroline Shank.        T.S.Eliot
10.22.2024.               Shakespeare

Today is Fr



I ponder life and sometimes
the whole solar system.
Why am I here? for what
purpose except serendipity

did God figure i should walk
the hallowed hills..  I was not
included.  But to be part of
the ******* experience
of Bill and Rita.  That did
not work out very well.

I digress that is not the Way
of Things for me now that
I am 78

So. I ponder.  That's a
silly word for the cogitations
I spend God's time with.

For instance I am presently
in the doctor’s office.  

This
poem i
read
frequently.  


I take the minute between
light and napping to be
with my friends.

I am about friends and
sharing stuff.

“I don't know much
but I know I love you.”

Aaron in the dark with you
And I slither into
reality.

“Love don't come easy”

It found me writing
the last love song.

To you.

Caroline Shank
10.17.2024

There is no world without
you in it.  The climb up times
ladder
is empty of rungs.

There is fire in my mind.
There are clinging bones,
clogs
Of dislocation.  Tomorrow
rests on the slippery south
of today.

If you deliquesce there where
you daysay
I may slip on what remains.

The rest is not my business.
I have two worlds
to choose from
on a bare basis of
belief.

There is no sense to science.
Blow up the universe
to your expectation of ruin
and

I never knew my own
legend.


Caroline Shank
10.22.2024

When I die I want to be
in love with you.
I want to take with me
your tender care.  I don't

want to leave you without
you knowing that a large
piece of the fabric

of me

was you.

I want to experience

you,

the breathless catch
which surprises me
everytime I think

of you.

The thought under the song
of you loving me   The words
of prayers, in so many
languages.  We were
Blessed to know that
love was our predestined

Minute.

We for whom God planned,
in the beginning, a banquet
of days.  Not years.

When I die I want to take
your voice breathing
our names,

over and over again.

          God give us a lifetime,

          for a minute.

         You and me.

         A prayer

         Returned.




Caroline Shank
10.8.2024

To think about getting old?
Ay that is the question.
Tomorrow rapes the day
of sentiment, the curling
onion skin that never

unrolls.

Any mind cannot comprehend
old age.  The loose tooth,
of retirement falls out.

Hope falls from yesterday
when,  albeit time allows,
the young scalawag cross off

future’s possibilities as the
insensible droppings of
the cat who remain in the
corner.  The shedding of

youth’s romances.

Old age ponders through
rheumy tears the last
kisses , the shoulders
on which shawls

Droop


Caroline Shank
10.8.2024

Try me, myself, into
the last chapter of my life
Today is full of Autumn
The call to the Winter
Poet to change from love
to the song of nights long
trill of darkness.

Climb down the
ladder. Reach for the
blue book.  The days
shorter my longing,
my wasteland

I'm over the reverie
of the old lady.  I
meditate and wait
to go.  


Caroline Shank
10.7.2024

Work in Hell

Another Gaza poem

When you work in Hell,
children killed, mothers
stunned.  

No screams
allowed.

Red daylight is
a way to see the
ruts the trucks

leave.

There is no curtain
to raise.  All the
players are

victims

Red shirted people
rush to the cries of

despair.

Your life sanctioned
your participation,

you hold to your

mind.

Irresolute anger toward
God to do

something.

I knew you then in
all your determination
to

help,

show as you can
the ways

Out.

Caroline Shank
10.6.3024

KK

I remember prayers
from long ago
suddenly sounds in
the

Air.

Your guitar brings
music to safety,
always
calling the way

out