*Poetry for Strangers is on hiatus, as virustime makes it difficult to meet strangers*
Dear readers: last week, when school was closed, we had a day of failing to launch—nobody could agree on what to do, and so by 5 pm, we had done pretty much nothing … EXCEPT read a bit of a book on kid-entrepreneurs (‘kidpreneurs’) that inspired my son to begin a business: selling crystals.
He has collected and studied rocks all his walking life, and now, in kindergarten, he has a rock-tumbler and a book about crystals. So out we went into the neighborhood, he and I, with a backpack full of his best tumbled rocks—as well as a few he found by the road while we walked.
The highlight of his business’s first open day was a stop at the house of our neighbor Truman, who hosts an annual geode-cracking party. Truman was exactly the person to appreciate such a business. “Do you know,” he asked my son, “that it takes a river a thousand years to do what a rock tumbler can do in forty days?” He invited my son to join his next tumble with his great-grandkids come spring.
Then the two sat: a young geologist and an old geologist, the rocks spread between them. They talked a long time. In the end, they made a deal—a $2 bill for the rest of my son’s inventory.
The Stranger: Truman
The Word: Rock
The poem I wrote:
An hour before dawn, in virustime, just as the mind begins to compose, he wakes with a nightmare so scary that I don’t feel comfortable sleeping in my bed. So I haul him up the ladder to ours, and to be fair, I haul her too. They are too heavy to haul – too long to rock – but when sleepy, they can be coerced. He sleeps bare, as smooth as a stone, and as still. She clutches soft things, green blanket etcetera, and wears felted pajamas, so I think the world can Velcro to her. She sleeps as if running, her arms spread like a javelin. Their father diagonals a leg across the bed like a log beneath their feet, small boy, taller girl. I close the trapdoor. So there: we four. Arked. The world, or whatever it is, washes around us.
The Challenge: Do you have a poem in you on this word? Write one here.
March 16, 2020 at 9:41 pm
How It Lives (Sonnet 18)
“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee?”
But this poem of yours lies dead on a printed page
Unless it bursts the barrier of a mind
That has not been made immune to poetry
By ferocious English classes. There it may find
A home to give it life and pass contagion
To others of its vulnerable kind.
But the immune still breathe, have eyes that see.
With them your boy’s eternal summer dies.
Your sonnet cannot live on rock or stone
Impregnable; it needs a gentle host
Whose breath and vision it can make its own.
Then it will not reckon how time flies:
This virus dwells in those who love it most.
March 18, 2020 at 1:39 pm
The Day She Found Out
She had a point to make
about fidelity.
That a rupture becomes sacred
in place of a vow.
Your eyes went wide
when her ring hit your cheek,
bounced the red oak floor and
settled in the fringe of that old rug.
The diamond had been 6 years naked,
stripped of feldspar
set in silver bondage
back on 47th street,
every bit of modesty left on that floor.
You liked it naked.
You called it “her rock”.
She used to smile,
but this day, she felt naked, too
March 19, 2020 at 7:55 am
Virus Verse
Alone I continue to be in self-quarantine,
nothing more to do than some verses glean.
Using the words neglected thus far,
I hope to pen a poem that raises the bar.
Last night in the wee morning hour
I penned my first six lines with rhyming power.
I had a word in a sentence rhyming with rock,
but now, oh dear, I’ve awakened with writer’s block.
The words to consider are grapefruit, jolly, flippant
odd, truth, and oh yes, esssse, should be sufficient
to create short poems for you…
Haiku
Ripe ruby red chunks
Plunging a spoon delivers
Grapefruit to my eyes
Confined to my home
Tends to limit resources
Considered jolly
From five seven five
Poems are generated
Flippantly composed
Odd, odd, even, odd
Fibonacci would be proud
Three, five, eight, thirteen
Telling the whole truth
Before judgment of the court
Means time with bars
Ashes drawn from esssse
Remind me that I am dust,
to dust I shall return.
March 23, 2020 at 8:47 pm
Between soup from a stone
and water from rock
we pause,
wonder whether ways
loop together or paths diverge.
I toss up prayers
that the road ends
before milk and honey and permanence.
For me,
all roads lead to you.
March 28, 2022 at 4:36 pm
To Be a Rock
One can be a rock
for someone else.
But what does it mean,
being a rock?
Or when you think of a face of stone,
do you think of something timeless,
granite, glacier-created,
or man-made, carved into a mountainside,
a tourist attraction?
Or your father, serious, the night his mother died?
His face wasn’t stone, though.
It was cracked, and weathered,
and wet from tears.
You were a child, and you watched it,
that face, not stone,
and you understood a little bit better
about what it’s like to be a rock.