Small Town

My childhood self

still walks the streets of the village

where I loved to visit

a grandmother, dead long ago.

Her aged friends

are still vivid in my mind.

One had a parrot that nipped my nose

and a goldfish pond

where the brilliant fish

eluded my childish grasp.

Another came to tea

and was given elderberry wine

because “the doctor ordered it.”

A glowering distant cousin 

with a crippled foot who came to visit

preferred to sleep on a feather bed,

so in the heat of summer

I dragged the dusty thing from the attic,

grumbling and resentful of that gloomy relative.

A box of demi-tasse cups

was given me by one of those women.

“Don’t wait too long to marry,”

was her advice.  -- ”I did.”

I sensed the sorrow of her life.

Unmarried women of uncertain age

seemed prevalent.

Why did they never wed?

Did the young men leave

for livelier towns?

Or did their beaux

go off to war and die?

Their locked trunks in the attic

were seldom opened,

holding treasures (I supposed)

for which they had no room

in the straitened circumstances

to which they had come.

Now aging as well,

I return to find

old houses remain,

still beautiful and cared for,

and the county courthouse

with the Civil War cannonball

still lodged in its pillar

looks solid and unchanged.

But busy stores

that then sold thread

and shoes and ice cream

now stand empty and forlorn,

and the ghosts of my childhood friends

walk the silent streets.

© Peggy Latham, 2012

County Courthouse; photo by Tony Russell

Ancient Conversations

The river of our tongues has dried to cracked earth.  

Too long since wear, crawfish pronunciations,

and bullfrog syllables are shells and lumps of sand now.

Ē kapuna, make wai ‘ia au.

I am thirsty for the metaphors of our grandmothers,

their every breath a prayer for peace and unchecked giving,

and receiving was as easy as a nap with a pole in my hand on a warm day.

I crave the torrents from times when women were gardens

and there was only one table to put a vase on.

Yet in place of flowers, homework, and electronic debris,

bountiful food prepared with god in mind was served

to strangers passing through the channel.

© Sarah Bordeau-Rigterink, 2012

Hawaiians eating poi, c. 1896
Photo by Strohmeyer & Wyman
From Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress

Give Me Something to Write

Give me something to write.

Inside me I hold a book,

Filled with page, after page, after never-ending page of hungry space.

My pages long for tales of the countless hours we’ve spent running through the night,

Of the oceans of color we’ve consumed painting the world with our souls.

There are words

That dripped from your lip like dew drops on a desert flower.

My pages thirst for them,

Were made for them,

Want  them to come home.

Send them home.

Your very walk inspires metaphors,

Metaphors with the power to make rational thought question its own existence.

Send your words and your metaphors home.

My pages will cradle them – like the moonlight,

Show them the freedom they were born to possess.

Run with me.

Let’s find our way out of this strange skin we wear,

So that we can unhide our holy.

Release the ember inside us that wants to burn like a bonfire unbridled.

This holy bonfire that burns truer than anything else that has ever burned,

This, too, would I write on my pages,

If you would let me.

My pages want only to remember:

Stories of us;

And of how we got here;

Stories of how we bent ruthlessly the rigid lines of this world’s senseless sheet music.

On those nights we ran, the paint still wet under our fingernails,

We pursued an irony we had only heard existed,

Tried to outrun a past we were destined to miss like a lost limb,

Our steps, accidental brush strokes on an ever-shifting canvas.

My pages want to remember the days,

The days when we knew what we wanted

Yet didn’t know what we knew.

We recognized beauty in all its forms.

And simplicity came naturally.

They were yours, and mine, and ours.

Send them home.

Inside me I hold a book.

So give me something to write.

© Axel Cooper, 2012

Artist Painting at Central Park
Photo by SpyON from Wikimedia Commons