~~♡~~


undeserved
favor
forgiveness
and
understanding

there is no higher love


soulsurvivor

A covey of old men
perch on a concrete park bench.
Their wattled bob - their heads nod.
It is warm enough to be without shirts,
and they watch the young men who are -
remembering when they could.
They are too aged to wolf-whistle,
dry lips peel in the light of day;
but they appreciate every curve and *****.
Pecking at morsels of life, they spend
the hours of their afternoons.

How I laughed as you threw rocks into the river.
Your little hand lost each stone on the backward stroke;
you waited for the splash that never came - puzzled.
You learned to count by picking up sticks for the fire,
but then you would want different sticks...
and dump your yellow bucket and start all over again.
The day you climbed into the huge plastic tub
where the was was soaking...that memory lives on.
Like Lucy stomping grapes, you danced around.

Every night we would pray and snuggle like spoons
in our tiny tent.
I would sing “The Rose” and “Amazing Grace”
while you mimicked with your sweet half-sung sounds.
It has taken ten years for me to be able to say your name,
or write about you in my endless stream of poetry.
But it will be only in the endless death of eternity
that you will live somewhere other than my heart.
I pray for a heaven, wanting to have the hope
of holding you on some distant cloud as you
throw stars into the limitless sky.

You grabbed my nose with your fingers,
the way adults tease children with the game.

But you were not playing games - were you?

You knew a hundred ways to inflict pain
without leaving bruises - with no visible
proof of your abuse.

There was the time you knuckle-knocked
me in the thigh - I could not walk for a week.

You did it because you loved me, you said,
to help me learn not to be so stupid and aggravating.

Sure would have been nice if you had not
loved me quite so much.

Old women eat curb-side blackberries
honeyed with dust and car exhaust.
They are stained with berries...
black birth marks.

They are never satiated.

They dare the dragonflies of metal
for the taste of juices provided by
a generous God.
Ground-fall pears are ambrosia
to old women who go to bed hungry.
Full bellies are a vague sizzle of memory.

Old women walk the earth
dropping bread crumbs to lead the next
Old Mother who needs to find her way..

A whiskey bottle thrown from the freeway
grazes the temple, to explode into
granular road-sugar.  She picks
stray pieces of amber from her hair...
just as delicately as she plucked berries
from their hairy, clawed vines.

Old women pray for darkness
so they can lie down, swaddled
in cardboard, wrapped in blankets of denial.

Old Women never surrender.  They endure.
Old women endure.