Lying Late in Bed on Monday Morning

The picture outside my window isn’t really a picture at all – 
it’s in perpetual movement,
a livestream of trees. 

If you tried to chart each leaf and the tiny journey it’s taking every moment
you would find it willful as a cloudland droplet –
each orbiting its tiny anchor with all its capering neighbors, madcap as a toddler on Christmas morning
while the squirrels run down and the birds fly up.

Meantime the deep roots reach and harrow deep
and think and plan ahead, quiet and provident, unalarmed parents of a million whirligig children. 


Photo by David Vig on Unsplash
________

This morning, lying in bed watching the window seemed like the right thing to do to mark 40 weeks and my due date. Due dates are rarely birth days, but parents remember them almost as well! – and I thought – “When I remember this day, I’ll enjoy remembering the extra thirty minutes watching the trees in the morning sunlight.” Since my daughters were harmoniously making their own breakfast, I did it.

The World Calls Me Mother

Half-drowned in fogs
I hear their call –
“Mama!” – the hoarse, insistent cry
– “Mama!” – beyond the bedroom wall.

Crawling the length
of wrinkled sheets
I sit, propped on an aching hand
and strain my ears to hear – just geese – 

arrowing northward
overhead.
Uncalled, I turn; work sleepily
back into warmth and the rumpled bed.

Yet after all –
why not? Does now
the world live motherless, unlike
its opening days? Then how

was she, bone-made,
first named
and – surely not with careless word –
mother of all that lives proclaimed?

October 31, 2020

Photo by Ian Cumming on Unsplash

Possession

A golden world was given me
and I lost it somewhere – I’m not sure where

A golden world was given me
and I spoiled it with anxious hands

A golden world was given me
and I ran too fast to see

A golden world was given me
and I sulked that it was not more

A golden world was given me
and I wept and turned my back

A golden world was given me 
and I dared not touch it once

A golden world was given me
and I knelt far off and gazed

A golden world was given me
and I knew it was 

not 

Mine.

Luxury

When I was young,
so very young,
and I had all the world and time
for every venture,
for every fancy’s flight,
still
I never had enough.

Now,

I cram an hour in an instant,

And luxury is easily found.