Sometimes It Snows in April

Gratitude: April 23, 2023

1. Snow in April 

Winter, you are 
the worst kind

of lover – soon 
as I hope for good

you’re gone
you return – cold

in hand –
bringing no flowers

Kevin Young 

2. Watching my sweet puppa sleeping

Safe, secure, and oh so loved. :)

Why I Loved Him By Camonghne Felix

 

I can’t tell you
Why I loved him or
What it meant. When you
Are a child, you know only
The kind of love your little
Life lacked, so every
Blooming flower is a field. What I know
Is that there were two skies
And under one, I was a shadow. His
Sky was as blue as his eyes. Some
Of that is my doing and the rest of it
Is time. These days, he traces the shape of
The curds above him and I lay out under
A separate sun. Both of us are fine
With this. We picked our place
Under the lid of god and we shut
Our eyes to it every night. That’s what it means
To have loved goodly—to meet
Fate in a lavender hall and walk
Right past it, the white train quivering,
Nostalgia in your wake.

Gil Scott-Heron - When You Are Who You Are (Official Audio)

"How pure your longing
to be anything other than yourself."

The Abduction by Stanley Kunitz

Some things I do not profess 
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.
"Do you believe?" you asked.
Between us, through the years,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real:
how you encountered on the path
a pack of sleek, grey hounds,
trailed by a dumbshow retinue
in leather shrouds; and how
you were led, through leafy ways,
into the presence of a royal stag,
flaming in his chestnut coat,
who kneeled on a swale of moss
before you; and how you were borne
aloft in triumph through the green,
stretched on his rack of budding horn,
till suddenly you found yourself alone
in a trampled clearing.

That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now, 
when I hold you in my arms, 
I wonder where you are.
Sometimes I wake to hear
the engines of the night thrumming
outside the east bay window
on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.
You lie beside me in elegant repose,
a hint of transport hovering on your lips,
indifferent to the harsh green flares
that swivel through the room,
searchlights controlled by unseen hands.
Out there is a childhood country,
bleached faces peering in
with coals for eyes.
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread? 

The Portrait by Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek 
still burning.

Gratitude: April 6, 2023

Unaccompanied Anthem 

We live as we dream ... alone.
—Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”

I was not born to this

wariness. I came of age

as my kind do—armed with ache

and swathed in rectitude,

a rough carving

sluiced under a torrent

of disregard. Still, I did not

suffer unduly. Most often

I bore witness: I listened,

then took it back into a solitude

neither light nor rain

could reach. There I would sit

and rock myself warm.

I tell you this long past

the learning of it. I ate quickly,

dreamt little, read like a fiend—

not quite a shadow,

more than a smudge;

you begrudged me

even these tremulous

pleasures. I came to you

grinning with grief,

but if called upon

would not pause to lift up a fist—

the only one in the room

who raises her hand

when no one else speaks,

though the answer is obvious. 

Rita Dove

Gratitude: April 3, 2023

Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow

when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel

of singleness, feather lost from the tail

of a bird, swirling onto a step,

swept away by someone who never saw

it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,

slept by itself, knew how to raise a

see-you-later hand. But skin felt

it was never seen, never known as

a land on the map, nose like a city,

hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque

and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.

Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.

Love means you breathe in two countries.

And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,

deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.

Even now, when skin is not alone,

it remembers being alone and thanks something larger

that there are travelers, that people go places

larger than themselves.

Naomi Shihab Nye