•••

I’ve had a vision:
Of me, a mother
Shedding my naive brand of womanhood
To take on the new role
Shedding childishness to bequeath it
Into the tiny hands that trust mine
And O Lord,
may my own hands be the gentlest,
the softest, let them always be open
And high up to You, O Lord, and
may my arms be warm and May my smile be wide and funny— May it make this child laugh and O Lord—
Make me this woman you’ve chosen me to be as mother.
Most of all minimize me to clear the way
For You— and Your ways
And for this growing, new, special, unique, never-known-to-the-world person.
I now know how you view us, your children. There is no other than that which I’ve created, held, loved, and brought into the world.
What a sweet vision.

•••

•••

All these new parts of ourselves and each other that we’re discovering
Trying and failing and loving
Shared newness is so sweet
in the cold beginnings of spring where the sun is warm and you start to feel alive again
opening up again with the other living things of the earth
Together we breathe in —
this cold warm old new beautiful beginning
The excitement of beginnings as nature shares that feeling with us
spring in love

•••

to see the love of your life
Sleeping with afternoon sun beaming in
Making dust glitter
Making you breathe deeper
Making a smile slip on your face
You realize this is life, it’s simple and good. It’s not all its cracked up to be, sometimes it needs to be much less. And it’s better that way.
It’s silly too,
That you craved spaghetti at 11 weeks,
Griped to yourself about going alone to the store as he napped

(and how dare he!)
(and doesn’t he know you’d like a nap too!)

But you go alone

(Because spaghetti was more important in the moment)
(and don’t we truly pick what’s important when it comes to?)

And you realize your moments are less quiet and alone than they used to be
They’re filled with a beautiful rhythmic music of life— of which I’m sometimes off-beat—
But the alone ones, moments, leave room for yourself.

And you come home with your ingredients,
and a lot less anger
And you see him, napping in the dust-glittery (sometimes rather messy) home you share
Yes this is life;

It should be a little slower.
with a few more of those alone moments
Where you can feel the beat
Of the music and your own heart a bit better .
And you can eat your spaghetti.
And your love can nap.

•••
Scribble furiously to trap the feeling just as it exists
I never knew the feeling of having a feeling so furious as to have it scribbled out of me furiously
I never had the time to
But now that my time is free Im free also to feel and my feelings complex enough to be trapped by the confines of a simple expression
No longer simple— no longer numb
Rather, perhaps curious
Those scribbled feelings furious

•••

Silky whispers slip
across the soft hairs on my neck
So, almost too, warm and yet?
Goosebumps all over
And over and over again you say
“I love you so”
And I, we, sink down into something
So unsavory to speak of candidly
But I will and I wish
Sink into me more, press down and say
“I love you so” some more
Again and again and over
It builds and swells and breathes with us,
This feeling, this warmth
And it pours from my eyes
And you kiss me in a way that I never knew was real
Deeply, softly, firmly, kindly, dangerously
Divine contradictions that coexist
in a little two-step tango

Seeking and always having sought
For a community
A collective whom who call themselves my home
“That’s one of ours!” They may shout,
Or at least which I’d hope for
But keep your eyes clean
for some of these are counterfeits
The mirage of “mine” are they
But mirages are a mistake of the eye so
Maybe the misunderstanding is mine also?
But undoubtedly I still want an undoubtedly
An “of course! Don’t be silly!”
Not only welcome to belong if I so wish
But to belong is a given
An assumption and simple fact
Yes, that would be nice wouldn’t it.

I know now why, or maybe,
How, rather, poets write with pens of pain
,and maybe,
Could even call myself finally one of them