The tree fell
Without ax to sever bark
Without storm to quake branches
Without water to weaken roots
The tree fell
Only after it lay down
Wide branches blocking, breaking
The road
Instead of shading
Only after it lay down
Did we see the hollowness
The rotten core
That brought it down
The men worry me
they come in at night to take a shower
in my bathroom
they stand over my bed
but I pray to Jesus to protect me
and they go away
The food worries me
they are putting something in my food
I can see it when I look in the toilet
after I, you know
brown specks, about that big
they look like raisins
sometimes I see them in the cereal
and in the rice
I eat bananas and Activia
I like ice cream and potato chips
but I have to be careful
For her, darkling demons, dementia’s brood
Blacken her mind, shutter memory’s flare
Fearful paranoia her only mood
Terrible conjurings her steady fare.
God promises to take care of me
If I persevere through my trials
It’s here, in the Bible
I have to persevere
The Ensure doesn’t taste right anymore
I think they put something in it
I don’t think they like me
But I never complain
People come to see the apartment
I hear them talking outside
They are going to throw me out
Our Father, whose art is heaven
hallow hollow be be bee in my bon…name, your
kingdom be done with this
on heaven
On TV, those cooking shows
They cook dogs and cats now
I don’t mind the cats so much
Not that I would ever eat that
But I won’t watch them cook dogs
I can’t the words in the prayer books
Right here beside me
I went to Bible Study but they made fun of me
in the dining room they laugh at me
because my feet are funny
and my throat makes a noise when I swallow
Each day her mind flees down steep sickness stairs
Each night’s delusions twist without relief
She wakes to troubled attempted prayers
Jumbles once familiar words of belief.
I have to persevere.
God tells me
Andi has been pregnant a long time
a year or two now I’m
waiting for that baby
My great-grandson Ruth
Woody’s wife that other one
she does my laundry and says
she and Woody are wife but Ruth
is died
Did she
That doctor, she wanted to know when I was born
She my graduation picture
I was quite a looker
I tried to figure it out
but I can’t remember when my parents
we lived in Emmaus
My father grew
strawberries I think he
drank
All meaning lost to Alzheimer’s sly thief
Robbed of truth, mem’ries comfort no more
God does laundry when Woody
comes I’ll tell God to
persevere
The couple comes out of
their hole to watch my TV
they don’t want to pay for their own
my dogs on the chair
protect me from that
snake under that what call chair
the dogs follow me
with eyes
that’s how
I know they’re alive
though Andi Andi Andi said stuffed
stuff of alive though
persevere
God Wood y
Andi came with ?baby?
picture who is that
No
Go way
Ipretty Joe
persevere
Who
When she dies, deep relief buries our grief
We pack her room quickly, a final chore.
Why write, griefless, when death has set her free?
Just this, please God, send swifter death to me.
His hands, tree roughened,
Move up and down my barked skin.
I recoil slightly when my own keyboard hands
Encounter a patch of my washboard skin,
Stuttering over ridges,
Withdrawing into planed places
Unmarred.
But his hands,
His gentle tree trained hands,
Glide over my body without pause
Accepting the damaged and the pristine
As if there is no sin,
No fall from grace,
As if there is only beauty
Created under his hands.
Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” John 8:2-11
Sometimes I wish he had let them stone me.
Sometimes I wish I could go again to my lover.
Sometimes I pray for death.
Once I was beautiful.
Once I was young.
Once I was wealthy.
I had a husband.
I had children.
I had a lover.
My husband divorced me.
My children won’t speak to me.
My lover, ah my young lover…
Who is he with?
Has he married?
Does he love her, as once he…
No, those memories are forbidden.
That life is dead.
That person, the woman I was then…
I need to remember my terror.
I need to remember my shame.
It is easy to remember their cruelty.
I remember their plot.
How they tried to use me.
How they hated and feared him.
They talked but not to me.
They dragged me.
They despised me.
They shouted but he spoke softly.
They stood proud and straight.
He stooped and fingered the ground.
They argued but he kept writing.
He spoke and they went away.
One by one they went away.
I was so scared.
I groveled, waiting for the first stone.
I don’t remember what he said.
Until he asked me who condemned me.
I looked up and they were all gone.
Even my husband had slunk away.
I said no one who condemned me is here.
He said then he did not condemn me.
He said go and sin no more.
But then they killed him.
He died on a Roman cross.
And his mercy died with him.
Now I do not sin.
Now I beg for crumbs.
Now I wait for death.
Sometimes I think stoning would have been better.
Sometimes I wish for a faster death.
Sometimes I hate him for saving me.
He saved me but could not save himself.
Though Mary says he lives still.
Mary says she talked to him.
Mary reminds me of him.
She has the same gentle strength.
Maybe I will go with her, as she asks.
Go to the people who believe he still lives.
My savior still lives.
Can it be true?
[Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly. Matthew 15:21-28]
My husband said, “Do not go.”
My mother said, “Do not go.”
My friends said, “Do not go.”
Still I went.
They said, “Those people will spit on you.”
“They will not let you near him.”
“He will not even look at you.”
Still I went.
“Do not humble yourself
Before that accursed people.
Do not waste your time.”
Still I went.
I went without hope
But with my great need
Because my daughter suffered.
So I went.
She writhed and twisted
She raved and cursed
She grew thin and dirty.
So I went.
A mother does not need hope.
A mother does not need faith.
A mother only needs love.
So I went.
And they did curse me
They pushed me aside
They called me a dog.
When I went.
I begged for crumbs
I groveled without hope
With only love.
When I went.
He met my love with hope
He named my love faith
And he did as I asked.
When I went.
Now I watch her play
I hear her laugh
I sing songs with her.
Because I went.
We drive home through tree tunnels
Gray skyroof barely visible
Through green and brown ceiling struts
Green fingered walls, now close, now further,
Yield downward to brown columns
Gray floor with yellow and white accent lines,
Sided with green grasstiles.
We drive home through tree tunnels
Now bright, now shade, now straight, now curved
The tunnels appear and disappear with no warning signs
Yielding to wide pastures, usually
Occasionally a house, rarely a small town
Just once or twice a bridge over a river.
We drive home through tree tunnels
Quietly enclosing us with the news
That she is, or soon will be, dying.
Death humbled is no more than brief sleep.
So says Donne, impudent, confident poet.
But if rest and sleep be just poor pictures of death,
What then of sleepless nights, of restless sleep?
Are nightmares harbingers of hell?
Do we toss and turn, each long night, in sleepless beds
As we will, one eternal day, toss and burn in hell?
Ah, please, God, no.
It is eternity enough to lie with wayward thoughts
Black as a moonless starless sky
Dark as lowering unplayful clouds
Restless as winds that gust only regrets
Toppling my flimsy barricades of excuses.
Death, though humbled, remains powerful
Storm enough to sink sleep
Leaving me stranded on a dark sea of doubt
Treading memory’s wakefulness
As buoys of peace graze my eyelids
Only to surge away.
The cows broke through the fence
Onto the side road, just feet from the highway.
One bright strand of new barbed wire
Ran between the old strands
Held up by older posts.
But the cows, though slow bovines,
Just leaned in
Leaned in and the fence gave way
And they wandered into the road.
You went out to help Andi round them up
Though neither cows nor fence
Were yours nor hers,
But being neighborly
And not being able to raise the owner,
You two went out to gather up the cows
Leaving us two, me and the baby, here
Where just moments ago
I looked over at you
Holding him close on your chest
Beneath your beard.
Your old man wrinkled forehead
Matched his baby worry face –
Six weeks and seventy-two years
Snuggling in the big chair
In front of the window
Beneath the framed picture on the side wall.
The lower edge of the picture frame
Made it into the picture I took
Of you and your grandson.
The hard edge of the frame
A boundary
Holding in all that love
That still breaks through
Even in a cellphone photo.
Once again my dream becomes a nightmare
I reject my daughter who rejects me
In sleep as in life
Although sleep reveals the reality
That reality obscures
Because in the dream, she is 5
Not 35
I am bloody from her thrusts
Though she thrusts with a doll
Not withheld grandchildren.
Each day, I forgive
First myself
Then her.
Not each night
But often enough
My dreams remind me
That forgiveness
Is not a sentence with a period.
Forgiveness is an art
That must be nurtured
Trained
Practiced
Worked at
Attempted again and again
Never perfected
I peer
Nearsightedly
At the screen
As news and not news
Scrolls through my mind
The French Ambassador rebukes Trevor Noah
For congratulating Africa on France’s World Cup
Four Alabama policemen are suspended
For giving a down low OK sign in an official picture
Is it a childish game or a white supremacy code?
A young male blogger whitesplains that music is the cause
Of everything that is wrong for black Americans
Not the enduring legacy of slavery, not racism, not white privilege –
Their funky ass music
I think
Sadly
How our eyes – my eyes
Are blinded
By our – my
White skin.
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