Friday’s Focus—A Note to a Friend

A truly personal “catching the tiger by the tail” moment in which I was simply the medium for the way this poem came through. This has been a week of transitions and moments of movement and movement and movement of people and events, all with a surprising softness in its unfolding. It’s almost as though the blocks and stop-gaps of the past few months’ energy is slowly exhaling her release and like a pebble thrown into the water, the circles are gently lapping outward ever wider. Borne to me early one morning, here is a poem called, A Note to a Friend:

Butterfly kisses and
Ladybug hugs.
Rainy day rainbows,
And fat, garden slugs.

With some tea in our cups,
We sit, you and I.
Two good friends…still…
All these years, by and bye.

We’ll talk of days past
And the hours to come;
Watch dragonflies and sparrows,
And maybe hear honeybees hum.

Neither distance nor years
Can keep us apart as dear friends.
All the magic’s still here,
Seen through a kaleidoscope lens.

Our cups, they’re now empty,
And the church bells, they chime.
This is not a good-bye
But rather, so long… ’till next time.

#takingitdeeper

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An Afternoon Memory in the Making

The church bells ring while the priest absolves the sinners
and the pigeons explode upward in flight.

The sky empties just as quickly as feathers
settle back down amongst the sandals and crumbs.

Your eyes smile at me as you pour the wine.

I inhale the smell that is this place and this moment, and
I decide, that dandelions are flowers, too.

And That’s How It Started

Tell me about the first time
that
you climbed a tree
or ran a mile.

Tell me about the first time
you
rode a bike
or caught a ball.

Tell me about the one time
you
got caught in the rain
and a
stranger gave you his umbrella.

Tell me, again, about the time
he called when he said he would,
and then met you at the door with flowers.

Tell me.
Tell me this…
Tell me that…
Tell me these things,
and more.

And I will tell you, too.

We braided our stories over coffee and tea.

That is how it started. This is how we started.

Now as we sit across from each other,
steam rising from our mugs,
the words from our stories hang between us.

We have grown and settled to a place
that is comfortable and where speaking is not really needed.
Just a look or a gesture conveys
all we need to say.

The hours and years of the intimacy of all that I told you…

And all that you told me…
of the first time
that
you climbed a tree
or ran a mile….

Ghosts of Red Rover

My husband’s oncologist’s office is next to an elementary school and by the time we arrived this morning for his appointment, the kids were already out on the playground for their morning recess. I gathered our bags and coffee cups from the car and I smiled to myself at hearing the raucous screams and laughter of the kids. As we walked toward the door, I stopped and placed my hand on my husband’s arm and asked him, “Wow, do you smell that?”

The moisture in the air from the coming rain warmed by the sun’s rays layered with the children’s voices wove together to become a tactile explosion of memory fueled even further by the shower of dropping leaves around us. All of a sudden I was back to being seven years old again, running around playing tag and Red Rover in the playground of my grammar school.

It seemed as though a thousand memories and feelings flashed in my mind in one second and it felt so good to feel that carefree again, where my biggest worry was trying to stay ahead of Colleen while I dodged Laura and Pat on the schoolyard in the race to avoid being tagged “it”.

Maybe it’s that my birthday is coming up or the fact that I’ve always loved this time of the year but my mood was melancholy to begin with and it didn’t need much more of a nudge to wax poetic. The very adult me who was accompanying my husband to the oncologist office, smiled at the memory of the (much) younger, innocent, me and mentally told her that everything will be okay and that things will work out. Then I took my husband’s hand, and walked inside.