The Dead Come Back With Things to Say

Tags

death, poetry, psychic awareness, soul

They show up in dreams as I shop for flower
pots, or peer down from above, crowded
by golden angels, or arrive in my study
like silent thunder. Tell my mother I’m fine,
they insist,

or, Tell my children not to cry, I’m in Heaven, or,
Say I’m with them all the time. The messages
I sent to families met with silence, even anger;
my courage faltered. The dead review
their lives and see

things in new ways, though they lose interest
in earthly doings and come rarely.
Last night my husband came from a place
or time so distant, he was the faintest
signal, light

from a burned-out star. He couldn’t
speak at first, but finally in a whisper
said, I’m sorry. In life he’d thought
I didn’t love him, and gouged me
with words

and withered me with silence, but now at last
he knew I cared. My old friend Kathy,
gone twelve years, came too, an angel
in a long robe, gray-blue, with curly hair
and wings of paper mache

the color of antique brass. She blessed her children,
leaving them at last. She had asked me to tell
them she was there, but I never did. She forgave me,
glided past the steeple of an old church and said,
I am at peace.

When the Soul Wanders

Tags

Love, poetry, Relationships, soul

When the soul wanders away from the body,
life is water spilled from a broken cup.
What thoughts steal into your mind
in the desperate hours of the night,
when your silver-white soul, the yearning,
feeling part of you, comes to me
and pours out its love and longing?

You hold tight to your desires, intricate
machines fashioned from pride and vanity,
their moving parts useless.

I fear you will not call back your soul,
for if you sailed out on the silver-white sea
that is your soul and all souls, your elaborate
machines would rust and crumble, the lies
that come so easily to you would fall,
word by word, into the salt water and dissolve.

And your soul would inhabit your body
with its joy and tears and its love that expands
forever. But then who would you be,
without the empty machines of your desires?

Sundays at Elaine’s

Tags

blocked emotions, emotions, Oakland, soul, writing

Oakland, CA 2014

In late afternoon, we gather in her kitchen,
six or seven women, sometimes a brave man or two.
Light-filled room, beyond the back porch
a patchwork of trees and other houses,
a feast on the kitchen table:
bowls of nuts, plates of cookies,
cups of coffee, glasses of lemon-mint water.

Our voices laugh and murmur, rise and fall,
until Elaine suggests that we begin:
a topic is chosen, timer set,
silence descends, and pens are put to paper.
She gently guides us as we move
from one subject to the next; we write
of secrets hiding in the chambers
of our souls, frozen fears, old aches
and open wounds, the stream of love,
flowing or blocked; memories that
charm us, haunt us, move us; courage,
how we bear the unbearable; and finally,
the desires that call to us, that float us up
to the blue heavens. We read our writings aloud,
unless reading the outpourings of the heart
to ourselves is more than enough.

Sacred time, when we invite our souls
to come forth in a ritual as old
as the dawn of language, when the tribe gathered
around a fire in a cave and gave birth
to myths and legends; now we sit in a circle
and tell our stories, rewriting
the myths of our lives.

Crazy Sister

Tags

blocked emotions, emotions, poetry, self-acceptance, self-hatred, soul

I used to wish I were someone else,
someone who didn’t have a crazy sister
living in my head
that I had to take with me
everywhere I went.
Crazy emotions:
murderous rage,
not sadness, but anguish,
ice-cold hatred,
a death-grip on grudges.
I wanted to kill her,
hold a pillow over her face
till she stopped struggling,
struggling to be heard.