Archive | Reflection

Shards of Glass

It did not seem like a loud explosion,
but more like a gradual erosion
when leaves turned to yellow, red orange and brown
and, just like my dreams, came fluttering down.
They lie, like pieces of coloured glass,
mixed with gravel and weeds and grass.

But why should I sit on this heap of rubble,
crying vexation for loss and trouble?
Out of the wreckage I’ll patiently dig
some things I fancy, though not very big;
something that’s funny, unusual or sad –
not like the grandiose dreams I once had!

Something may waken a tear or a smile,
or brighten for someone a wearisome mile.
Life holds no prospect of public acclaim.
Millions will never have heard of my name;
but I can reflect back the sunshine’s bright beams,
recovering sky-tinted shards of my dreams.

–  Marion Wyllie

Bridges of the Mind

Bridges are the world’s great striders:
Span after span out of the memory rising
Into each bright and complex city –
Every human mind among us –
From the many other shores
We once have stood on
As evanescent
as this is

Bridges are highways suspended
To bear us into unknown territory
Foretold in our imaginations –
Till our destiny receives us –
To bring us into new realms
Where strange stars rule and
Our future is
impending

Earth changes: shores alter; are gone.
Our bridges however may linger till after
The transforming moment invoking
The new world we hardly envisioned –
Our full realisation that
Now we’re in harbour
And time is beyond our
recalling

– Michael A Mason

The Air Cools

I
The air cools,
the night crawls stealthily
like a lynx on forest path
and snow begins to fall
on the black statue
in the square,
a bird looks down
from its shoulder
to find a better shelter
from the cold.

II
I lived my life
and now night approaches –
I would be asked two questions:
did you love?

Indeed I did – so much and deeply:
the roses in my yard,
children’ s smiles,
stars winking from above,
even this winter cold with
fleecy snow – and him.

The second question:
did you sin?
and here I smile –
I’m too old to recollect.

– Gedda Ilves

Thoughts of Afterlife: Immortality

I’d be a tree
in youth lean and supple.
Bowed, bent to accommodate
winter winds yet
re-leafing in full beauty
in my middle years.
Each fall a little rest,
each spring a resurrection.
A cycle onward, outward . . .
there’d be no final death.
My leaf litter rotting
as ancient limbs crack,
returning to earth
from which new life
and seeds will spring.

(Inspired by a reading from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman)

– Barbara B Feehrer

A Disappearance

The peacocks have all died.

No one knows why. I imagine
their raucous cries growing more and more muted
as the light goes out of their shimmering feathers,
their costumes from a summer pageant, a festive touch
along the walks and over the lawns of the Zoological Gardens
where they have been allowed to roam freely
parading their arrogant plumage and jeweled eyes
past the torpor of caged animals, until,
like a race of trans-dimensional beings,
they all dissolve at once.

I’ve always thought them exorbitant creatures, grotesque
illustrations of natural extravagance, but there are those
who say what little magic the post-modern world
still holds has begun to desert us. Others hope
this erasure augurs a more equitable distribution
of glory throughout the lower realms. We look for signs:
curtailed flamboyance among the flamingos, toucans, macaws,
or streaks of increased vividness
in the subdued, the endangered,
but nothing seems to have changed.

Perhaps the peacocks were
intrinsically transitory, like the leaves
that turn crimson, saffron, old gold, and fly
off in the wind. When they’re gone, the sky
fills the trees with uncluttered light. Still,
we’re not entirely cheered by their evanescence,
or by the news that they’ll be replaced come Spring.

– George Amabile

Peonies

Ants crowd the surface of the buds
in early May sucking the nectar
that seals the petals closed. Day
after day they work, attacking
the petals’ edges. Week after week,
the buds grow larger, and then
one morning, there they are:
the petals in the night have given in,
the ants are gone, and the buds have
flowered into a lovely white tinged
with pink. Other buds attract no ants
for some reason, or not for long, and
forgetting the promise of bloom, they
harden and wither away.
Marriages are like that.

– Bill Reynolds

What If These Days

(Inspired by Charles Olson)

What if    these days
I let myself float along
without plans
without the need
to know
what comes next?

What if    these days
I let time
carry me along
on currents
of    sun   wind   air?

What if    these days
I let go of time
Stopped counting
minutes    hours   days   years
Would I still be me?

What if
I allowed each hour simply
to carry me
Would I fear the face of eternity
Would death become alive?

Or could I let each precious day    unfold

without

– Evelyn Torton Beck

Limited Limitations

So little time!
So little time
in which to learn
everything!

I want to experience
I want to know
I want to feel
the velvet purple of the iris
watch the English dogwood
explode into
thousands of
symmetric disks
in petaled beauty.

I want April’s aesthetic
pleasures in August.
I want July’s luscious
fruits, in May.
I want September’s
voluminous harvest,
in December.

I want new beginnings
in all my endings.

My
needs
are satisfied!

– T Garvice Murphree

Mindful Soup

While onions and garlic are sautéing,
and I am drawing fresh, filtered water,
a woman is walking many meters
to dip a bucket into a well
at a refugee camp in Uganda.

While slicing organic carrots and celery
carried home from the farmer’s market,
a four-year old boy and his six-year old sister
are sorting food scraps
in a garbage heap in Managua.

In goes clean barley, scooped from the grocer’s barrel,
while a man in Myanmar, a woman in Somalia,
are stirring a kettle above an open fire,
rice gleaned from their village’s diminishing crop,
by cyclone or drought, by soldiers torching fields.

Into my garden for chard, spinach, basil,
green and fresh, planted by my own hands,
while the child in Sierra Leone whose
hands were severed during civil war,
now a young man, begs in the streets.

With each ingredient, I become smaller.
The pot simmers, I stir, taste, season.
A roadside bomb kills an American soldier
and two Iraqis, the streets of Tijuana
splatter with blood. A woman in Congo,
left to bear her rapist’s child.

– Sylvia Levinson

Reading Obituaries

are we related to something infinite or not –
that is the telling question.                         – Carl Jung

Your passion, I read, was Bingo.
But what I want to know is:
When you slapped down your counter
and yelled Bingo!
did you for a split second
enter samadhi?

And you, I read, loved to crochet.
Patient hooker,
a lifetime fell from your fingers.
What link did you find
in those filigreed chains
and who let them drift
into bins at the thrift store?

This one loved to go fishing,
loved his lures, his fisherman’s luck,
his small wooden boat. Fisher,
alone at dusk,
the sea a mystery around you,
did you ever see yourself
inside a fish’s wild eye?

Loved ones, when you write my obituary,
say this: Once, sitting still,
she changed into a tiger.

– Mildred Tremblay

One Potato Two

When I look at my body,
its knobs and foliage,
sinkholes and scars,
furrows of flesh,
I reflect that
going back
to the far mists of Ireland,
to my O’Reilly
and Dolan and Kennedy forerunners,
to Queen Maeve herself
I am

mostly potatoes.

The first solid food
spooned
into my baby bird mouth

was potatoes.

Twice a day on the table
my mother
slapped down
great heaping bowls
of white fluffy clouds
laced with butter and salt.

In Heaven the Holy Family
eats nothing but potatoes.
Sacred Potatoes
washed clean
in the tears of Christ,
cooked to immaculate perfection
by Mary.

In the kitchens of Purgatory,
semi-devils
burn the potatoes
on purpose.

Hell is worse. Hell is
no potatoes at all.

– Mildred Tremblay

Widow’s Weeds

When you died, I decided to wear
black for a year

The year passed, but I don’t know how to
undo
When I dress, I still reach for
noir

But spring’s in the air
Will it bring me will to wear
white with the lilacs
jonquil yellow
heart’s blood rose red
and giddy greens of all the season’s weeds?

– Marianne Vespry

Winter’s Gift

I curse the endless frigid months
hug self-pity with a mug of tea
huddle close to the fire
the power’s out again

I sit and wait

finally hear whispers of truth
meaningful messages stirring me
spiralling down into stillness
a new lightness rises
bringing a brighter time

acceptance reigns over chaos
thoughts that would drag me down
into despair
lose their power

I’m lifted up
and start to understand
the struggles of my life
knowing that with letting go
life can be simple and joyful
if I just let it

and the lights come on!

– Valerie Nielsen

Presence

I saw a new heaven
and a
new earth
Red horizon, dark waters
melt and merge
With clouds and waves.

The yellow blushing sunset
Reflects in waters below
Which shimmer and flash
creating a
spectrum of
chromatic dispersion.

Moments pass
The sun sinks
slowly to rest.

The Graced One’s
Celestial mystery
gives way to
Night.

– Sr  Mary Doris Pook

My Enemy / My Friend

Enemy / My Friend

My husband read it somewhere:
“Make food your enemy.”
He actually tried to pass
that piece of advice unto me.
Me, who never met a morsel
I did not like . . .

except maybe anchovies.
I’m now supposed to do an about-face,
turn my back on a friend.
If food was my enemy,
I’d have long ago been stabbed
by a chunk of cheddar.

The advice does have merit.
So I studied thin people in restaurants.
Yes, they do seem to loathe
what’s on their plate,
complain of over-generous portions.

They even poke their fork at salads,
fearful there’s a calorie lurking
behind a lettuce leaf.
Or they rudely shove food aside,
leave it behind.

Not me, food and I are pals
and I don’t desert my friends.
Dessert?
Did someone say dessert?

– Betty J Van Ochten

Hyannis

Our mother
slips behind the moon
and enters stars, silver
over a Cape Cod sea
on a perfect night
as a poem slips words
over paper, ships
of the mind –
sea salt everywhere
after the storm.
Our mother
clips our swimwear
to the line –
while her breath goes on
for a hundred years.

– Edith Van Beek

Exercise

Those gurus of our health care thus advise:
“Bestir yourself, get out and exercise”
But as for me there’d be no worse a fate,
Than in activity participate.
What? I should walk or jog or run a mile?
The thought’s so ludicrous it makes me smile.
To my well-being what a horrid menace,
To slave at badminton or squash or tennis.
Beside my well-filled glass I lift no weights,
And you will never see me dead on skates.
With dignity, as to the manor born,
I just disdain to climb the Matterhorn.
And if you wish to talk of climb – ’nuff said,
The only climb I do is into bed.
Develop muscles – pectoral, abdominal . . . ?
There’s surely nothing could be more abominable.
Avoid all risk, go nowhere near a gym,
And only in my bathtub will I swim.
Row, row, row my boat gently down the stream?
No! No! No! I won’t! – not even in a dream.
What? Someone saw me paddle a canoe?
That vile, malicious rumour’s just not true.
You spy that guy who expertly can ski
Come swooshing down the slope? That sure ain’t me.
I spend my days in dolce far niente,
Which is the only thing I do in plenty.
Each day is filled with non-accomplishment
And zero calories is all I’ve spent.
But all these thoughts have made my head so ache
In self-protection this resolve I make:
From all my mind to totally excise,
That horrid obscene word of “exercise”
And any need to cogitate I’ll slake
With wondrous thoughts of cookies, pie and cake.


– Noel E Derrick

Let Sleeping Cracks Lie

Every other week my mind prepares to mix
a spot of lime mortar to fill up
the crack in the wall,
just a cosmetic job
to deny spiders some territory
– just a way of showing propriety
at the comer of the window frame.

If then one day my hands were to fix the hole,
how long would it be before the living strain in the wall
slowly,
politely restored its balance
and handed me back
the natural crack
I’d taken away?

– Alan George

Getting There

It took over half a century for my selves
to fit comfortably inside this familiar skin

The Curious Child
questioned everything

The Mute Poet sang freely
undaunted by mirrors

The Everlasting Learner
learned how much she had to teach

The Clown dropped her crutches
to join freely in the dance

The Fool found the wisdom
to become her own best friend

The Storyteller spun tales
part myths, part truths

The Parent abdicated their futures
to her daughters and her sons

The Evangelist laughed
abandoning the crusades

The Advocate
stopped playing god

The Pacifist fought
to find inner peace

And the old Survivor
healed her wounds with words

– Lorna Louise Bell

lonely as a line cut kite

aloft in distended sky
i flap with restless to and fro
in swells of wind that bind me here
between a yielding downward glide
or a final upward flight

i am suspended in such solitude
by cumulus dreads of oh so wanting to please
against an oh so never measuring up
forgetting all sticks and stones
in the gale of careless words
sharply fragile as a changing mood

yes these quotidian shames
rising in vapours of unseen anger
seclude me in the tangled air
where i yearn for celestial spheres
to grant release oh ever peace
from outer faults and inner blames

what is the tether chord of living
that reels enough of space to ascend
above the cling of mortal grasp
yet guides return to now another earth
where heaven loves through little loves
– but the long strings of forgiving?

– Eugene Coombs

The Voice of Silence

Saint Francis said
to preach without
the use of words,
to keep the tongue
untarnished by
fine phrases
when talking to
wild animals
and birds
and to their lice.

God is in the silence
as Christmas lights
are more luminous,
more numinous,
reflected on
a polished floor –
their scented haloes,
cinnamon and aloes
aromatize the eyes
of the soul
just as
the spirit hears
without the aid of ears
and from the windows
of the body peers
through cyberspace
into eternity.

– George Whipple

The Shepherd & His Goat

You never leave,
You are before, behind
and all through me.
When You hold me
in the hollow of Your hand,
how can anything go wrong?
When I walk the cliff-edge
of earthly desire,
Your staff is a verdant hedge
against my falling.
When I insist on being wrong,
just for the thrill of it,
Your rope tightens
and I feel the sharp tug
of Your disappointment.
Surely, goodness and mercy
are spread out before me
like a carpet of wild flowers,
and You will shepherd me home
in spite of my meanderings;
for ultimately You have faith in me,
Your goat of awkward dimensions.

–  Royal L Craig