Sunday, August 26, 2012

MEMORY KEEPER

Photo by S. Auberle

Memory Keeper
  
I trace the outline of Nina's hand,
as I've done with all of my tribe.
Giggling and wiggling, they allow me
this strange game.  Sometimes,
the hands I draw are newborn,
like tender young leaves reaching toward light. 
 
Nina does not wiggle her plump, brown hand,
rather, looks at me solemnly,
as if considering this odd business.
She comes from a different land,
and I will never know
how her mother's years were measured,
how her grandmother tended babies.
 
There may be things Nina will recall one day,
if only in dreams--tall, African skies;
a lullaby sung to her in those two days
held close in her mother's arms;
the scent of red mud in Addis Ababa streets.
We do not know what the heart may hold.
 
Will Nina's memories include my touch,
drawing,on  a summer afternoon,
the whorls of her fingertips, the dimpled hands?
Paper crumbles, ink fades, people forget.
What we know--love remembers.
 
~  mimi

First published in a slightly different version as the title poem of the Emerson Poetry Series Anthology--"Memory Keepers", a publication of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Door County, Wisconsin.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

IN ROBERT'S GARDEN

Photo by S. Auberle

IN ROBERT'S GARDEN

How it is with art and lovers:
sometimes you wash the canvas clean,

erase the words, the image, the touch
begin anew your life.

Here is where it bloomed,
Robert's garden,

his mother lode of joy,
here a man and woman stood

on  a summer day like this,
astonished by the sex

blazing out of Robert's flowers
lost in the music between them.

She remembers flagrant peonies,
bees, heavy with nectar.

He remembers her,
suffused with heat and blossom scent.

There are some who remember
Robert's paintings of the black rose,

how he finished the last,
wiped his canvas clean and left.

Maybe this is how we begin and end:
speaking the language of flowers.

~  mimi

first published in Crow Ink, 2009 by Little Eagle Press

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

SILENCE CONCERNING AN ANCIENT STONE

Photo by S. Auberle

"Here I am, seated, with all my words, like a basket of green fruit, intact.  The fragments of a thousand destroyed ancient gods seek and draw near each other in my blood.  They long to rebuild their statue."

~  from "Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone" by Rosario Castellanos, 1925-1974

Monday, August 06, 2012

IN MEMORIAM

Photo by S. Auberle



THE MORNING AFTER 

Doves are murmuring
under my eaves
this morning after tragedy.
Write, they’re saying,
because there is nothing else
you can do. 
Write, because it hurts,
sometimes, to breathe
the air of this world.
Write,
and when you come to the end
of words,
pray
and think of wings.

Sharon Auberle

for the Milwaukee victims and all others who died yesterday in senseless acts of violence around the world...






Saturday, August 04, 2012

SUMMER HAIBUN

Photo by S. Auberle

BEACH ROAD 7:00 A.M. 

The August morning is steamy.  A crow calls,
halfheartedly, as a timid sun climbs above the
orchard.  In the garden deer have visited
during the night, checking the tasseled corn.  
Queen Anne’s Lace and chicory dot the grass,
moist in morning dew.  Beach Road is quiet—
a neighbor’s garden on the corner its usual
flamboyant self, but all else is shy, summer’s
green robe still wrapped tightly about her. 
cicadas rehearsing
autumn song
one red apple falls

~mimi

another "oldie"--hope I've not published it before, but if so..o well, it speaks of the season, the beauty of summer and what is to come...