Writers
Posts tagged Morning
Poem: the insignificance of importance
0Dominique Larntz * December 11, 2012
Even I fall
into the spire spiral
of seeking status.
From my solitude
there waits an imagined
audience, anxious for words.
I’m less prolific than I could be.
Shamed for writing too slowly, my pen nestles
as a needle against my thumb.
The drumbeat of my blood presses
me to create a clever lyric to hush
that great fool wanderer of a muse.
She laughs at my manufactured timeline
and its coated companion, stress. She trades
this suggested piercing for sunshine.
Her compositions blossom into me
off-demand when I am not ruminating
about my breathless audience.
When I am pouring a glass of tea,
liquid in the complete pleasure of being
myself within a wave of language.
Poem: Breakfast
0Dominique Larntz * August 13, 2012
Awake now, I crawl out
and open the top drawer
to pull out my underclothes
of helplessness and guilt
and I consider pulling them
over my tender skin.
I can smell what is cooking
out there—something
delicious and certainly I
should cover up first.
Get dressed, then take
my plate to a quiet place
where no one can see
the depth of this
naked hunger.
Poem: Surprisingly, How Pain Left This Morning
0Dominique Larntz * June 7, 2012
I was walking down steep dirt in the desert
with the same hurt hip that visits daily
in my forties, and each next step became
the uncertain place that pain makes
its bed frame since the accident.
For a few steps, I relied exclusively on the right,
placing my left only momentarily where I knew
its sole would not slide amongst altitude’s tiny granules,
and landed gracelessly with several hard gaits on its companion.
There’s a shooting pain in this sort of imbalance
that no poem can soothe, because it is outside the words
and inside the music of movement in the space
surrounding what I call myself and my body.
I stopped moving halfway down that hill
and I started to meditate instead of hike.
I took my eyes from the bottom of the crest
and focused on the rock right in front of me.
I changed my mind’s calculation
from counting the steps to get to my car
to noticing that I am in this step.
I told my left hip, I am here for you now.
I sustained a simple, humble change
of awareness in each step,
and the pain dissolved quickly
in an unexpected surprise.
Surprise because I was just
trying to finish the walk without falling down
and I had no eyes for easy steps
where each side supported the other.
Wherever else uncertain,
I am sure to take this walk again,
and I may not always find such easy relief,
but I can dig my heel firmly into faith
in the restoration of balance
over an uneasy terrain.
(With kudos to Thich Nhat Hanh For his Walking Meditation which inspired my walking meditation today.)
Poem: Still
0Dominique Jones * March 8, 2012
Still
All we do is stay still
in New Mexico and the light moves.
On one March morning I have seen
stillness shift into a hurtling
aluminum zia plate.
And then some trash that blew into
what I call our backyard
(because i live
and take seriously
this time frame
of a human lifetime
and i wave my language
around like tiny wings
in the big wind
and our economics
are like flocks of birds
crying out in the skies
together and my mortgage
is my flute note in that song)
became part of a blizzard flurry
dusting and dazzling the xeriscape like feathers
that squeezed the breath out from my eyes
and for a moment my muscles needed to stop
before the coffee cup reached my lips
and I needed to do nothing but look.
Look at the marvel
of the sudden morning storm.
The power went out and the sound of the wind
touched my ears as it wound
around the house like a ribbon.
I remembered the reports from all the watchers
who reported that the sun has sent excessive flares
today and I imagine its solar arc infecting
my body, my cells, my being
with radiation
and
the facebook post I will offer
if I die from the storm
but not now–not now–because
the power is out
and I am writing by hand
I am watching the evidence of the wind
I am swirling with birds
I am sudden and curling in the March
desert snow against the rocks
and concrete and zia covered steel
that we blanket ourselves with.
Still, I have done nothing.
Poem: Waking Tune
0Dominique Larntz * February 10, 2012
Waking Tune
I love to listen to the morning–
the rush of thoughts in my mind
like a tide that builds quick footsteps
and then quiets into silence
in the shower.
Then the coffee grinder
along with the bird that shouldn’t be
here just after Candlemas.
I wouldn’t expect him until Spring.