Tuesday Poem: From The Notebook

 

Cinderella's Daughter

Nights, when the servants were

deeply asleep, my mother

traded her lace for homespun,

her crown safely

back in its lock box,

my father abed  and dreaming,

adrift on the ship of state.

I watched her in secret

as she danced with the broom,

bent and crooned to the dustpan,

fondled the stiff little bristles

on the idle head of the scrub brush.

Work called to her, it was

her secret, her benediction,

kneeling in the ashes,

sweeping the hearth

cleaner than it sometimes

already was, scrubbing

the stones in the hallways

till they sang a hushed

song of gratitude

beneath our feet.

All of life's ugly voices

gradually silenced by her hands,

rosy from running water,

dancing over every surface,

making me a tapestry

that told the complicated

story of her entry into Paradise.

Tuesday Poem: Up From A Long Sleep

Conference 
While an older woman lectures us on Habermas and epideictic writing, based in citizen voice events, notions of complication, and public consequence, 

her ideas hang like twigs in the tightly constructed, multicolored rhetorical nest she is weaving, though we are somewhat distracted by her younger co-presenter, who is trying to hush her feisty three year old, who sings as he draws on the back of her yet-to-be-presented paper, by tearing a page away from the three hundred twenty-eight others 
in the conference program, and folding it into an airplane, which takes off from the table, rising and falling at the end of the little 
boy’s arm, until it comes crashing 
down, like a baby bird at the older woman’s feet, and she slowly stoops to pick it up, never missing a single beat.