Living the Dream

I am a mad woman with a mystifying map of my tomorrows,
but no less medusaesque meaning to be placed on it
than were the times I tripped into the same hole
in the same detour I had taken over and over
until I learned to walk another way.

I am a wild woman with willfulness to my walk,
head down, head up, but striding surely into new dawns
as if I held a handful of stars I had collected
from the sky’s garden the night before.

I am a bent-over woman, dropped to my knees
to study the feel of clay creations
that are made when someone molds my hands
to theirs and a form finds its way to being
an icon or a totem, a singing bit of mud
that harmonizes the heart’s need to continue to create.

I am a dried reed, shushing the humming green
grasses and sky-carving songs of birds bent on belief
that there will always be another day,
another way to set feelings free, while I rattle
this skeletal spine with the knowledge of being absent
but present even as I lay down my bent-blossomed blessings.

I am a root, crawling deeper in fearsome frosts,
waiting for reason to stretch out my fortunate
fine fetal attachments and break through
a warmed crust to join those unfurling ferns
on frost-filigreed soil that might not be ready for me yet.

I am a gifted woman, handing out promises
in printed paper that wraps the wasteland
with hope that even a weed can be beautiful
if a weed will wrangle the clods and clots
out of the way in order to wave my ribbons
in a breeze of blessings to a wearied world.

I am a headstrong woman, who waits out each year
with wide-open eyes, knowing that balance
comes from be willing to be bent to the brace
of a good god that planted me here for reason,
or treason, for  rhyme and time, for fringe or shawl
sureties that wild and wonderful has a place to be.

Come women who have withstood the weather,
the wrestling and the wry wrinkles of another year.
Be wild with me, be winsome, be ridiculous,
be willing to cast off the curious and dance
to a new moon, a new night, a new reason
to realize the dreams of being dear and different.

Tags: Poems //