Creative Writing and Literature Masters Program Complete!

I am just waiting to receive my final grade in my last class and have my program portfolio approved, but all of that is out of my hands!

To celebrate, I thought I'd post a bit of my work (just poetry for now) from the program. 

Enjoy!

5:18 A.M

Emily Dickinson beckoned me to my window

with a tattooed moonprint

on the carpet below the sill,

six-paned and lovely.

And I saw, through Emily’s eyes,

one neighbor’s light dancing through red sheers,

one sedan gliding down the road.

She brought me to my window to find this poem.

She showed me how to see what there is to see

when no one is supposed to be looking.

Poem

All these years of hips and thighs and muscle and instinct,

my body delivered my girls with the reflex of knowing.

You, though, kicked and fought with angry heels

your path artificial, not of my flesh.

My girls arrived with shrill cries of life.

You sulked into the world broken, insolent.

Daughters borne of me

A poem born in me. 

Blood and ink

both.

Manic

Morning

slides out of her cracked shell

so sweet

and urgent and

Jackson Pollock fills the sky

with drips and splashes

of to-do lists only half-formed

in my mind.

There is still time,

I tell the birds.

So sing, even though

it’s early and you are chirping

more loudly than my alarm clock

that will never be set as long as you

keep chirping

the morning news

starts even earlier now

because the breaking news ticker

scrolled all night so there

must be something to report first and fast.

Each morning the same

routine, procedure, schedule.

What began as beautiful becomes

a metronome of must

go and do and get

until day bends toward evening

and there is only the threat of

tomorrow to lull me to sleepy

haze of dreaming of the

magnificent morning.

For Esperanza

Outside the petunias in a pot

will blossom when the soil’s richness

can grow dollars instead of flowers.

Inside I write words forward and backward

and upside down, just like I lived them. 

I never type them,

the whack of the keys like gunshots. 

You cried when I left, but not the kind of crying that cracks

your heart into so many pieces that you

can never find them all. 

Your crying was the song of a hungry kitten.

I will not be gone forever. 

Only until my petunias have blossomed.

I will have legs that carry me back and away,

filled solid with dirt and words and blood and love. 

Home to complete the circle

and away to begin my own.

Straight Lines

This morning I was rereading Georgia Heard and Jennifer McDonough's A Place for Wonder:  Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades when I was stopped short by this beautiful poem.  It captures what I believe so movingly:

All the kindergarteners
walk to recess and back
in a perfectly straight line
no words between them.
They must stifle their small voices,
their laughter, they must
stop the little skip in their walk,
they must line up
at the water fountain
straight, and in perfect form,
like the brick wall behind them.
One of their own given the job
of informer--guard of quiet,
soldier of stillness.
If they talk
or make a sound
they will lose their stars.
Little soldiers marching to and from
pretend
their hair sweaty
from escaping dinosaurs
their hearts full of loving the world
and all they want to do
is shout it out
at the top of their lungs.
When they walk back to class
they must quietly
fold their pretends into pockets,
must dam the river of words,
ones they're just learning
new words that hold the power
to light the skies, and if they don't
a star is taken away.
One star
by one star
until night grows dark and heavy
while they learn to think carefully
before skipping,
before making a wish.

I believe childhood is too precious to press into straight lines.  Thank you Georgia and Jennifer for confirming that.