BEAUTIFUL STRANGER

I remember you
being
the beautiful stranger

I just had to
get to
know

the one I
knew I
couldn't let go

held hostage
by a smile
entangled in your laughter

turning my head
with a mere
turn of your head

you the beautiful
stranger who
became my beautiful wife.

COUNTING
(  tusent selen siczen in dem himelrich uff einer nadel spicz * )

no don't ask me
how many
let's just say...a lot

angels dancing on
a pin or on a needle's point
doing their angel thing

now swing
now the Charleston
now a Black Bottom

"Oi! Angels! No!
Keep it quiet
for Heaven's sake

but would they
listen  - oh no
*******

making it impossible
for me to try to thread
this &@%/ needle

oh God now
they're dancing
the Can-Can...again

"Dónall son. . ."
me poor auld Mam pleads
"...that needle threaded yet?"

"I'm working on it Mam
I'm working on it!"
the angels snigger at my efforts

"Ok..let's begin then
that's one. . .
. . .a million and one!"

me Man snatches
the needle from me
"Oh give it here son!"

she licks the end
of the bright red
thread

passes it through
the eye of
the needle

a million and two
angels fall from its point
answering this needless question

**

James Franklin has raised the scholarly issue, and mentions that there is a 17th-century reference in William Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants (1637), where he accuses unnamed scholastics of debating "whether a Million of Angels may not fit upon a Needle's point?"This is earlier than a reference in the 1678 The True Intellectual System Of The Universe by Ralph Cudworth.

Helen S. Lang, author of Aristotle's Physics and its Medieval Varieties (1992), says

The question of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle, or the head of a pin, is often attributed to 'late medieval writers'.... In point of fact, the question has never been found in this form….

Peter Harrison (2016) has suggested that the first reference to angels dancing on a needle's point occurs in an expository work by the English divine, William Sclater (1575–1626) in his An exposition with notes upon the first Epistle to the Thessalonians (1619),

Sclater claimed that scholastic philosophers occupied themselves with such pointless questions as whether angels "did occupie a place; and so, whether many might be in one place at one time; and how many might sit on a Needles point; and six hundred such like needlesse points."

Harrison proposes that the reason an English writer first introduced the "needle’s point" into a critique of medieval angelology is that it makes for a pun on "needless point".

A letter written to The Times in 1975 identified a close parallel in a 14th-century mystical text, the Swester Katrei.

However, the reference is to souls sitting on a needle:

tusent selen siczen in dem himelrich uff einer nadel spicz *
— "in heaven a thousand souls can sit on the point of a needle."

And your glance,
Was the aroma of an orange tree...
That used to turn my body green;
When I'm seeing you,
Spring grows in me...

STARRY STARRY NIGHT

She switched off the moon.

Plucked out the stars.

A little dog barked
as her scream scrawled:

“This time life has gone...too far.”

She took an overdose of sleeping tablets
in her big bright red car.

The day withers
that was once in bloom.

Petals fall
in an empty room.

The moon wept.
The stars cried.

Life was for living... Life lied.

I am pulling weeds from the garden and I want to scream "there is nothing wrong with you there is nothing wrong with you there is nothing wrong you"
I am replacing you with something beautiful and hard to maintain because I value appearances more than growth
There is nothing wrong with dandelions i swear, please do not develop a complex, I just cannot love you unless someone else does
My father spent years weeding me and trust me it gets easier
it hurts less if you learn to hate yourself the same way
There is nothing wrong with you I just have to do this he is coming over later and he might remember he doesn't love me if he sees you here
There is nothing wrong with you but I will **** you still
Like my father
Commended for everything I grow in the wake of what I ****
There is nothing wrong with you I scream but I will throw you away and you will wonder what is wrong with you anyway
He told me I have room to grow before hugging me goodbye
There is nothing wrong with you he said
I just don't want you here

I knew I was good
I felt it when I looked down
Reveling in the work I'd done,
Yelling and proclaiming
So that you would know too
That I was good.
Oh, how small I was,
How small a thing to make you so angry.
I didn't know yet
How to make my joy quiet
For your bad days.
You would have loved it
If you'd have taken the time
To look at it.
To really look at it,
To look at me.
Would you have looked?
If I was good?

She numbly sits in a ragged sleep shirt
Her life in tatters all around her,
Pieces scattered bent and broken
It’s cold and raining in her soul
And she lost her new umbrella.

Celebration banners flap in tatters
From the New Year party deemed long over.
Confetti pools in puddles at the curb
Staining rainbows in the murky water.
The echo of the midnight chime a memory.

Three hundred unfulfilling days await her
Should she stumble to her crippled feet
And stagger to the place that should be home.
But there will be no cocoa by the hearth fire
Or anything that might engage her mind
Except the fact that there will be no rescue.

Sitting numbly in her ragged sleep shirt
She has no thought of any better place
Available to someone with an injury like hers.
An wound that cripples ingenuity
And renders her unwelcome
In the tangled depths of her own mind.
        ljm

To be without a reason
to be.

To be a worn inside out
kind of being.  To miss you mostly
your absence, like
falling water,

puddles.

You make the tears
want to fall.  You slant from the
pictures .
Grant me Oh Lord a minute.

I am trimmed in half.  Your
consecrated remains on
the bookshelf.

Tomorrow is the Blessing
that holds the map of
living without you.

You walked in the Garden.
You never said that kissing
was underrated.  It's how

you left in your bed in a
May afternoon.  The
last time to say I loved

you turned away.  Was
life with me so hard?

You ran to God to save
your demented soul.

I watched from my window
As

you

Flew away.


Caroline Shank
6.24.2023