winter poems
October 2020-January 2021
These poems are presented as both images and text. I welcome you to read and engage with the format that feels best to you.
a poem for winter light
A winter of snowstorms
A winter of snowstorms
that melt the next day
rime ice like thorns
that glisten once
then turn to slush
winter of puddles and mud
so soft you could dig into it
yellow winter light
in a cotton candy sky.
poems for the aftermath
These poems speak to how we recover after a disaster, to what must be lost and what remains.
Provisions I
Call it a season of disarray.
We stand shaken
as if a storm has always
just rolled through.
Caught in a perpetual aftermath,
we survey the pieces of everything
and wonder what to salvage.
What’s even worth saving?
Out with the old, in with the new!
I’m rushing to the dumpster
with an armload of fear and disgust.
Then back to the pile.
Provisions II
Some things are broken, it’s true.
But some are whole, untouched,
glistening after the rain—
gardens, casserole dishes offered with notes,
chalk messages still bright
on the sidewalks,
communities of helpers
blinking in the sun.
So look closely now
and turn each piece.
Hold it up to the light.
It may prove useful
for the journey ahead.
a poem for change that is long overdue
This poem experiments with the beauty of change, even change that feels disruptive and unsettling. The poem was inspired by James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time, where he writes:
It is the responsibility of free [people] to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free.
Change in the sense of renewal
Change in the sense of renewal—
to finally do without
the outdated paradigms—
begins with an outlier
begins in spite of a high chance of failure
is an experiment
is an unresolved chord
that invites the whole band
to improvise.
two poems for the internet
I know, I know, I hate the internet too. Yet somehow it is both wasteland and oasis. These poems explore the oasis part, in a time when so many depend on it.
There is a pileated woodpecker
There is a pileated woodpecker
in the zoomed-in picture
filtered through window and screen.
An armchair birdwatcher shares it
online, the photo grainy
on my screen—
a window through which I, too,
see the bird and the screen
and the window
and am somehow, for a moment,
sitting in the armchair
aiming my phone camera
at the majestic bird,
its body so easily holding there
on the horizontal branch.
I know of a place on the internet
I know of a place on the internet
where people ask for help
having watched, through the screen,
others ask and receive
and around their need
a huddle forms.
It is this function of the internet—
container for all our best and worst
vessel ungainly and heartless
so many of us wish we could forego—
the huddle of help,
the corner of kindness,
that widens the web of connections
we cannot live without.
love poem
Over the thanksgiving holiday, my spouse and I hunkered, disconnected, rested. This poem started as a poem about the moon, but turned into a poem for the person in my life who holds me at night.
A love poem
On the fifth day of our staycation
we wake to the setting moon
orange and whole,
visible because the leaves are gone.
With you I have cleared the room
that is my consciousness
pulled away everything
that encumbered my view,
tripped my steps.
Now nothing but branches
between me and the moon
forest poems
This fall, I spent a lot of Sunday mornings hiking in the forest in the Mississippi River bluffs surrounding Winona. These poems are for the forest. They don’t feel quite finished, but I still wanted to share them. Read abundance through the leaf-litter, and wealth in the dark decomposition of a season’s growth.
There is wealth
There is wealth in the dead leaves
something to go down, down, down for.
In layers that are some thickness
between foil and skin,
oak and hackberry, maple and ash,
basswood and pine
knit a rich robe here
as the earth prepares for sleep.
From this abundance
There is enough shelter
for every living thing
in the forest.
Leaves pile up knee deep
in the lee of the wind
and for all those that blow away
or break, brittle against the rock,
there are millions more that remain
to give their carbon back to the earth.
Slowly they soften, split, mold, rot.
Scent of toast and wine, used tea bags,
gardening gloves and mud puddles.
Let’s learn from this abundance.
The past giving to the future
more than enough—
a legacy of shelter
and the means to build it up.
poems for how I feel about suburbs
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a quiet place, or a beautiful home, or “neighborhood character,” or a yard. It’s when these things become a proxy for whiteness and affluence—and are held onto at the expense of others—that the suburb stands in the way of building a community and a future. I should add it’s possible to have a suburb mindset no matter where you live. These poems explore the choice to isolate, withdraw, privatize. To hide from the world when we belong to the world. With a hint of false promise.
A quiet suburb
Maybe you want to live in a suburb so quiet
nobody even lives there—
it’s a row of well-manicured facades,
set pieces with decor
that complements your own.
No sound in the cul-de-sac
no bootprints in the snow at the playground,
just puddles
and the scent of fabric softener.
A poacher in the refuge
There is a poacher in the refuge.
He watches his decoys bob
in the pond where weary ducks
dive down to eat and drink.
And it always works—
the setup—
looks like home, a nice suburb,
a boat in the garage.
Already so many are enjoying
the views!
The poacher shoots and wades out
to retrieve his kill.
The decoys watch
with their painted eyes.
poems for paying attention
It was impossible not to write about the news cycle this fall and winter. I have many feelings about it, and these poems explore my feeling that I need to stay awake and aware, alongside my feeling of utter exhaustion with the stress of that awareness.
Background noise
What is an emergency?
Or when does an emergency grow stale—
outlasting the initial horror
until it becomes
“something to keep an eye on”
News cycle
Lately we’re always at the scene
of a tragedy. Now another shooting, another
drowning, another confrontation.
Somewhere at this moment
a motorcycle backfires and it sounds
like a firework sounds like a gunshot sounds.
Everything is escalation.
Our edges grind against each other
grown harder in the cold.
Like reaching for a handshake
and grasping sleeve—
everything warm pulls away.
poems for a late winter
We’re back to where we started, with winter poems. These poems reflect my own journey of embracing this cold and dark(ish) season for all it has to teach me.
Last night
Last night
for a few minutes
it snowed so heavily
we could hear the snowflakes
hissing onto the ground.
Under streetlights
their shadows converged
as though we were flying
through space,
and the snowflakes
were stars.
Over and under it all,
a thick, clean kind of silence.
And we breathed.
The darkness is not unkind
The darkness is not unkind
is a time for starlight and lamplight
glow behind curtains
glow above clouds,
long dawn, long twilight
and all day
my shadow is long in the light.
Snowhush on sleeping streets
cold mornings with the sound
of sparrow wings
and everywhere footprints—
reminders of body in place.