Tuesday Poem: previously published in the anthology: Women.Period in 2008

                                                                                     Painting by William Blake  
Sleeping Beauty

Like a frog out of the water,

like a big clumsy fly caught in a screen,

I entered womanhood

flailing my long legs.

Jumping Double Dutch in sneakered feet,

pounding a Morse Code of denial into the sidewalk,

so it echoed throughout the neighborhood:

not me, it said, not me,

I'll play with dolls forever,

I'll be a boy

if I want to,

I'll go off and play

by the railroad tracks.

Or spinning crazy like a top

in the grass of the backyard,

almost mowing mother's roses down with my arms,

then swooning beneath our peach tree

heavy with ripening fruit.

Dizzy it always made me dizzy,

and sleepy too, this newly tilting

pigeon thrumming inside me.

Thought I'd never want

a prince bending over me,

his face so much like a brother's

with its teasing wheedling eyes,

and mouth that kisses too hard.

 

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Embers in 1987

To The Great Grandmothers

How did you take that first step

through the doorway of prosperity

into teeming gray Manhattan ?

From small villages,

and homely neighborhoods,

you voyaged to the gates of Babylon,

stepped outside of history, sailed away

from bustling Holland waterways

lined with leaning narrow houses,

turned your back on windmills

turning in slow motion,

Left the grit and bustle of Glasgow,

the smoky Staffordshire potteries,

lyric Dublin with its bicycles and pub signs,

windows full of curtain lace

reflecting narrow cobbled streets.

You made a clean break,

hearts beating a new cadence,

you marched into an adventure,

bearing talismans from home

full of prayers and promise.

And you were immortal saying goodbye –

like a bride made light by eagerness, and bravery,

ready to be swept across the threshold of mystery.

Then it must have been with sober feet

that you first planted yourselves

on United States firmament,

cast your lot in with all the rest,

tossed over in great waves,

as you were by the cold Atlantic.

And in the streets moving through

fields of faces, their patterns

intricate as Delft ware,

Royal Dalton, Limerick lace,

listening hard for a quiet space,

a familiar word in the din,

every inch of the air

and turf of the place

raucous with activity.

I wonder how your hearts

endured it: the dragon

and the labyrinth of New York,

whether poems or nightmares

danced inside your heads.

I picture your faces a little gray

from the shock of it all,

frozen, still as a photograph,

caught in a flash of insight:

in this enormous marketplace,

you would never be more than small change.

Tuesday Poem: previously published in Poetpourri in 1992

The Hunger Angels

first came to her when they were fighting.

Their whispers made her feel 

like she’d put her ear to a seashell.

They told her her father swallowed his anger.

They danced like little fireflies around him,

swirled inside his undertow of loneliness,

swam in his beer, made fun of the white heron

poses, he learned as a boy, in a kitchen

where there was never enough to eat.

She watched them hover like hummingbirds

as they buzzed her mother's fork,

oozed out of her sandwiches, as she took her 

giant bites. When Mommy sat quiet, they gathered 

in her hair, stirring up the racket of memory,

with its abuses, desertions, hard work that made her

disappear into cooking pots, and gourmet magazines.

The little girl watched the two of them

tangle with one another in despair.

The angels multiplied then, their faces

becoming her parents' faces in miniature.

Put us in your hope chest, they said

when she was eight years old.

Someday you'll open it,

and we'll have grown like dumplings,

or steamy loaves of bread.

No head of a pin for us, babe.

We’ll keep you fidgety company.

Just  fire up those cravings.

In her innocence she welcomed them,

glad to be included, not knowing

how else the story might have gone.