Week 2 – 31 days of poetry 💕

Day #8

I wrote this poem in some parking lot in Redondo Beach, CA. I love palm trees.

Palm Wednesday

Impossible,

They, like wiry pillars

rising

rising

rising

into the blue

Bent, just so

unmoved by afternoon breezes and

the bleat of rush hour

Naked but for a fringe

a crown

Impossible,

Their roots plunged beneath the crust of earth, fingers locked onto something

she could not yet see.

 

Day #9

Written on July 4, 2017, on an airplane. Inspired by a delicious and crumbly jam cookie I bought in a patisserie in Paris.

 

Raspberry jam + pistachios

Round, stodgy cookies chunked with chocolate these were not.

This was Paris.

Peekaboo-red jam framing a pale, buttery crumb. A tile of sweet, pebbled in pistachio.

A cookie worth pursuing.

 

 

Day #10

“Guest” poet Mary Oliver (super famous in the poetry world!)

Hummingbirds

Mary wrote a lot about simple things in nature, which I appreciate. I love how she calls hummingbirds “tiny fireworks” in this poem – she has a remarkable gift for making the commonplace sound extraordinary.

Read Hummingbirds, by Mary Oliver.

 

Day #11

Written sometime in the spring of 2017, after a run.

Untitled

Thirsty, wet and tired

I came to the end of my path

On the way here,
I dropped my phone
Took a wrong turn
And considered turning back a thousand times

But the palms and the sweet smell of ocean and wide open horizons kept me
pressing on

So I’d made it.

But what now?

I had arrived, only to find another opening- sharp rocks edged into wide blue
waters
No path
And unsure of how to navigate by the stars

 

Day #12

Written February 1, 2019. I thought about this poem while driving down what my mom calls the ugliest street in Los Angeles (Hawthorne), after dark.

The other side of silence

Lanes crossing
And 4-way stops
Where all paths paved to hell
Buzzing cocoons holding dear, warm
Sacs of worry, fear & threat

She turned a corner
Despite the hellish streetlight glare
And had a thought:
Space & nothing would be nice
So she went there

 

Day #13

Written September 27th, 2017. 

Butterfly Pt 1

The sac she was born in
dangled lightly
held on tightly
and impossibly

But she was edged in gold
even as she remained tightly wound and secret from the world

She knew so she struggled

In the darkness, she found she had wings

 

Day #14

“Guest” Seamus Heaney.

Blackberry-Picking

Seamus Heaney is very obviously Irish, so I automatically trust him as a poet. His writing is very tactile-sounding – You can almost feel and taste the subject [blackberries, in this case], as you’re reading.

Read Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney.

 

Day #15

Written February 1, 2019.

Untitled #2

Summer passed
again
and she woke to the promise of nothing
no hot black night could redeem
her now

scraping chairs on a classroom floor
frantic chase after letters and boys and release