Heidi Franke

Heidi Franke Mar 2024

This wasn't the train. It scooped you up to a different destination. Birds of splendor followed along
Out the window
Winding in your path of grief. Be ready for the station waiting
To greet your sorrow.

The platform is not clear. The mist hides the light then becomes a flow of water you can reach and touch. Become aware of the grief but don't move towards it. See it instead in the palm of your hand. Dip into the water cupped in your hands to cleanse your sorrow.

You will have times of freedom. Embrace all feelings. Let them fall into the stream of water. You will lighten. You will see more color as the mist dissappears.

You will see the light between the leaves of the trees. The sounds of song birds lifting you up with messages for you alone.

#grief #train #water #mist #feelings #sorrow #song #bird #tree #light

Heidi Franke Mar 2024

Pulp

I felt it
When I spoke
To the judge,
For my son,
Years of shell work
Encasing fear and sanity, cracked with each glance, falling away. Everyone listening.
I was left lost
Like a snail losing it's shell
Mushy and vulnerable
A Pulpy mess.

Was it enough
That I said
Or too much.
So much was left out
The Russian Roulette admission
The thoughts of jumping 15 floors from his hotel
So many letters making up words and paragraphs upon paragraphs
of 15 years.
Throwing out a gun
Into the city trash.

How could I be anything more than a mother
Who let the saving flatten her out of existence. Incoherence and pulp.
Will it be discarded
All that effort
To keep him alive
At my expense.
Is that what mothers do?
I'll never get to return. Life doesn't
Let you.

Speaking to judge on behalf of mentally ill son's crimes.

#crime #pulp #judge #mother #son #vulnerable #mentally #ill #gun

Heidi Franke Feb 2024

Sentencing

Today my son
Is to be sentenced
To prison. He
Lives 23 hours a day
In a jail cell, he will move on
Steeling courage few of us
Ever have to experience.
Consider your luck.
His mental illness
never to be a crime.
Will there be light for a prism?
Where he can turn to
Other pathways
Less dark and Forge
Himself into the open
Blue sky and all the rainbows
From here on out.
On the outside we are blind
On the inside some
Are given true sight.
I cry for a rotten system
In mental health care
We own. You might
Want to pull up some buckets
For all mothers tears
Knowing the best we have
Is incarceration. How is that
America? Tired of blaming anyone but yourself?

A son is to be sentenced this Monday morning. Prison transfer on Wednesday.

#prison #jail #light #sight #prism #rainbow #ourside #inside

Heidi Franke Feb 2024

The Twenty Fourth Hour

He was in his cell
Twenty three hours a day
Never was he an animal
Yet treated as such

The echoes off the walls, bounce
The metal doors that clang, bang
Endless boredom after
All the books are read
He paces his eight feet

Gray dulls the senses
Lack of color, lack of life
He saw a bug inside
The other day, alive
Looking up at him
Another form of life, different,almost brand new
His voice filled with hope through the Pauses

It rained and the summer was hot
They were released for the hour
Choices that are made in that precious time
He went outside where there is only the cement
Laid on his back, spread his arms like an eagle, like an offering
Letting the rain Fall onto him,
just so He could feel Something

Sharing the experiences between a mother and son. The son is incacerated. Too many non violent people are imprisoned for far too long.

#prison #jail #rain #hope #cage #time #gray #boredom #animal

Heidi Franke Dec 2023

Without Warning

After he died
Without warning,
I planted a tree
Announcing
Just as suddenly
The Serviceberry
To the others
In the garden
Each bud of a branch
  welcomed by the fresh earth
And dormant bulbs yet to burst
The Aspen as role model
Hastily, deeply
she was added
As quickly as he left
In pursuit of
Recouping buoyancy after starving for oxygen.
Consoling under her generous shade
Begging for silence of sufferings and
deep sorrows

Three years have passed
Has it been that long
There they are,
our memories,
in the control room
That cling, stab like a blade
Taking over the clock
A contagion of disorder
That eats away
like acid
Explicitly unwanted
Clarity of that night
Frozen in time,
like the winter
  it happened.
Time ended without warning
Deaths metronome gave birth.

Uneven disbursement
Over one thousand days
Since
Asking why,
Why?
Why!
Prone and exhausted.
Drowned in tears that forged
A lake of salt
Why then
Do we not float?
What's holding us up?
And another thing,
Where does the wind
Go when its gone?
It dispatches
   without warning
Whirling in circles,
Catching conditions
Why am I
not so
shaken then?

The Serviceberry has yet
To bare fruit in its
Short life to fifty
Holding steady,
Enduring the rooting road
In the pragmatic ground
Surrounded by leaves from seasons
As messengers of compassion, companionship
At the foot of her trunk
An offering
Once again in winter, here we are
Sleeping until the sun
Bleeds more time
Why does three years
Feel so heavy and capricious
As if it were just yesterday

Will the depth of sorrow remain
After she blooms and feeds
The hungry birds,
Over 35 species,
Who love her nectar
Caring for the offspring
Obscure, neglected and hungry
Giving back, keeping the healed
From further storms of
Sudden causes
As he did for his flock
Harbored in what the doctor
Ordered.
Tender
Loving
Care

Will heartache be replaced
By forgiveness?
Like the passing bus
That descends the hill
Into a valley of green hearts
Picking up new passengers
Loving another
Forgetting the importance
Of yesterdays bus ticket that
Flew out the window
Arriving without intention
To its destination
Neutralizing the anger
That came without warning
Glancing out the window
Towards tomorrow
As the birds songs
Are sung

The unintentional death and road of recovery.

#sorrow #death #regret #without #warning #foregiveness #birds #tree #loving #anger

Heidi Franke Dec 2023

What If The Opposite Were True

There are no limitations. You
Receive help that
You never accepted.
It now encircles you.
By an outstretched hand.
No one bites it off.
Acceptance received.

The sun directly investigates
Any unwillingness
To not accept change. Bringing a pinch of new light.

Who would you have to be
Stepping into the
Other side?
Finding you are truly good enough.
That any other connection
From limiting beliefs
Unravels, like opening a pomegranate. One seed thinks it's all alone,
not seeing all the others encased in their own restrictions.
What if it were the perfect time? The full ripe fruit.

You are the right age! This is the perfect time!

What if the opposite were true?
What would you do? Even if a part of you did not believe it?

Bathe hence your confining insistences.
What is in your skyline? Your oceans horizon?
Supplied with new resources, a deliberate inventory, of unrestricted beliefs, if the opposite were true?
Then who would you have to be
To make it unmistakable?
Who would I want to be
If the opposite were true? Now, only now, as a matter of time.

Reflections on a learned patterned of thinking, leading to a false self identity.

#opposite #truth #now #unmistakable #confining #growth #self #ideas #unrestricted #limiting

Heidi Franke Dec 2023

Rain Synapse

Riding the air
In dark morning
A steady current of rain
Descends
Upon everything
The fir tree
The house roof
My dogs fur
The empty Ash tree
The fallen leaves
Brown, red, yellow, orange
The bird feeder catches the water As does the bird bath
The puddles
The street
The cement
My head

My ears hear each
Multitude of patterned drops
In apparent chaos
Reminds me of the
The synapses in my brain
Circuitry, each drop a connection from
Dendrite to dentride
Messages of the unknown
Of falling to earth
Of vulnerable life
Unprotected.

The unhoused, in the cool soaked air of December. Will you remain blessed?
Will you spread your joy in the patter of rain to those who bare the rain in their skin, on their dampened clothes? Adding a chill.
Will today you find some without a home
Bringing tarps, blankets, source of heat, to those who listen
To the same rain
While they shiver
And you stay in your glow with your tidy wood burning fireplace. Stay comfortable? Risk giving for giving sake. What floods of love can you share in December rather than giving to
Your precious family, the left overs, the excesses
And give to charity that make each day another day for breath in rain from the heavens. I choose the rain. I could be the one in
The open now, soaking as I pen these words.

Hoping words of love, neutrality, non-judgement and altruism be the "church" we reside in. Drop by drop.
Over a hundred different sounds of rain brought to earth by gravity, in my receiving ears, and the tiny sparkles of light reflected upon the light from the street lamp shining upon concrete saturated by this extended morning rain.

Sunday. Sitting under my porch with coffee in hand, dog at my side. Dry from this music of rain. Thinking of the homeless. Now mustering the strength and courage to buy Starbucks growlers full of coffee for about thirty and driving around town once again finding cold people shivering. Time to order that coffee and give warm to some as best I can in my limited way. Looking for costs of pull over rain coats. My gifts to my children this year is to give what I would give them to others less fortunate. Be neutral in your thinking. Be rid of judgements of self and others. More love, less hate.

#rain #homeless #giving #synapses #gift #fall #winter #cement #cold #coffee