Categories
Poetry

Death of an Adult Child

The Death of a Child is an experience every parent dreads yet some must bear.  Whether the child is young or old the pain is ageless. The poems in this small collection reflect the flickers of light that reach that dark place.They will resonate with anyone who knows what love feels like.

There are nine poems in this chapbook. Here is the first:

Questions to which there can be no answers

For the foreseeable future

When your road ran out

Did it end in dense fog or open

Onto a bright sun on the shore

Of a blue-watered ocean? Were

Old friends waiting? Will you be waiting

For me? Or perhaps, as I sometimes feel,

Have you never left?

Death of an Adult Child is available as a chapbook from Amazon or directly from the publisher, Cyberwit

Categories
Sky Full of Clouds

Sky Full of Clouds

Clouds shift, change shape, just as memories do. Here are some of the memories I’ve pinned down this year.. I hope they resonate with you.

From Sky Full of Clouds:

A Louder Silence 

The hearing of the greater wax moth is the most acute
in the animal kingdom—
this moth can hear an approaching bat.
Does the moth also hear,
I wonder,
the murmur of other insects,
a hum of traffic?
Cries for help,
the blaring of sirens?
Grass growing, hammering on the moon? And if the sounds stop,
would the moth be startled,
afraid for the moment
it was alone in the universe?
Today, for the first time,
when the postman rang,
I didn’t hear the bell. 

Available in paperback from Amazon and from the publisher, Cyberwit.

Categories
After You Poetry

After You

This poem was begun on the night my husband died.. I wasn’t sure I would survive the pain. I thought of the way a bomb disposal expert records what he is doing so that if he doesn’t make it, others will know where and why he failed…..’Now I am cutting the red wire’ . I began that night in February and wrote a poem a month for twelve months. Each one records a stage in the journey.

Here I was in June:

Sometimes now the fog lifts

And I see the shore

But my boat has no oars

And days are sails that fail to catch the wind

I’ll sleep

The tide must turn soon

***

Available in hardback from Amazon

Cruse Bereavement Care and its counterpart Cruse Bereavement Care Scotland are the United Kingdom’s largest bereavement charity, which provide free care and bereavement counselling to people suffering from grief. After You is included in their list of six books which might be helpful to those who have lost a partner. It is also recommended by the Good Grief Trust.

Categories
This life: a love story

poetry

The haibun is a form of storytelling popular in Japan. It combines narrative text with 3-line haiku.. I tell my love story as text combined with poetry – cherita and the occasional long form. This life: a love story tells what came before After You.

Here is one poem from it:

Souvenir

It’s a small wooden box-

stencilled with flowers and the town’s name in white-

Santa Margherita de Ligure

A souvenir so I would remember  

a village pinned by sun to a hillside.

Forgive me. I have forgotten even

the unfamiliar light

recalling only you

and how gently you placed this gift in my hands, 

like a poem or a promise,

as if it were fragile.

and here is a sample of the text

………..We knew the farm would have to be sold sooner or later. Arthur had bought it and willed it to Jack, a millionaire’s house that needed a millionaire ’s purse to run. Five years later, the time had come and the estate was sold to a conglomerate of New York business men.

One day, looking about for the last time, I opened a cupboard in a seldom used room. On the top shelf , there was a familiar green box . It was like glimpsing the face of a friend in a crowd on a foreign street. My school lunch box, the one I’d filled with cookies and shipped off to Jack in the South Pacific seventeen years ago.

Lifting the battered lid I found inside, wedged in the corner, the miraculous medal with our initials engraved on it.

I asked him about them that evening.. I said I was surprised he still had them.

‘Do you think you were the only one who could love so much?’ he asked me.

And I said ‘yes’.

from This Life: a love story

Paperback and kindle versions available from Amazon.

Categories
ARC

poetry

Something New

The cherita is a new poetry form, devised in 1997 by the poet ai li. ‘Cherita’ is the Malay word for story or tale. Concise and straight forward, depending on suggestion for its impact, it is perhaps the ideal poetry form for today.

More narrative than the three-line haiku, less lyrical than the five-line tanka, a six-line cherita furnishes the reader with an image that expands to a story in the mind. 

ARC is a collection of my cherita. If read in sequence, the 66 cherita tell a life story, a love story. They can also be read at random. Most of these appeared first in the cherita.com, edited by ai li.

ARC is available in paper back and in Kindle formats from Amazon . 

An example of the cherita:

I was happy

sleeping in his arms

waking to his voice

never noticing the clock

how quickly

the hands move