Please no box, no steel
to seal me from the earth.
Return me when it is my time
to all I was and wish to be again.
Release me to be born anew,
green and wonderful each Spring –
shoots sprouting from my heart
each part of me blooming.
Promise me.
Cynthia M. Sheward
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PROMISE
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HEARTS
I did not know when I birthed my son that he would take my heart with him. At night, desperate for rest half asleep, barely present I’d attempt to nurse him. The choice frustrated us both. One night when he cried, I took him downstairs to my rocker, made tea, made us comfortable and realized he was my life. He grew. I watched my heart learn to walk, read navigate friendships, school and grieve a first love anew. He became a man who with his spouse created three children into whom he placed his heart. Together, powerless but present remembering our own youth we watch their spirits grow as they navigate their lives. We’re participant and spectator both since we freed our hearts to beat, break and love inside our children.
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NOTICE
A blue jay struts across the porch
to forage in our planters.
The red streak at eye level's a cardinal.
White “ribbons” wrap the trees - plastic prayer flags
to a God, gnome or Goddess unknown.
A cuban lizard pulls one off
the live oak on the corner.
As I leave Johnnie’s Bakery,
an Agama, his head and tail stripe
the color of children’s aspirin,
races ahead of me.
Johnnie’s bread has the taste of hope
hand-made, crusty, fresh.
So too does the air, laced with scent of
gardenia, magnolia and surf.
Beauty confounds the thought of so many dead.
Mourners bereft of goodbye are blind
with grief while fear heightens others'senses.
How can such extremes of bliss and horror
cohabit this planet?
The return of wildlife, clean air and
quiet seas make it clear
this earth can shrug us off
without notice. -
GIFTS
My aunt gave me the sea in a book big as me. Curled in a chair, I wandered tidal pools despite the Christmas chill held hermit crabs and starfish inhaled salt air. I walked that book’s pages with childlike devotion an eight-year-old explorer baby beach comber. Robert Frost’s snow drifted into my 4th grade class and I listen for his horse’s bells as I practiced writing and first used an ink pen. Line by cursive line his poetry became mine along with the smell of ink, the feel of good paper, the love of pens. I began my own poems in solitude, sweet solitude…
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TERROR
Dad dreams we flee the Nazis, our ‘55 Buick low on gas. We drive by the sea. They come with guns. They come in submarines. He wakes sweating and terrified. He shares his fear with me. Nazis enter my dreams dragging the stench of Dachau. They come with guns. They come in submarines. I wake sweating and terrified. Neo-Nazis march in Charlotte armed - flags waving, hatred palpable and near. In dreams, I hear the thud of boots on the night stairs.
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flu
Hold every cell still palm under chin legs and feet balanced. Stay in the trough between cough and ache. Sleep without waking the dragon. Forget how tooth, limb and eye throb and cry for relief. Dream, pray hope this will pass.
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GRANDDAUGHTER
She touches me as if I'm rock or tree immune to time and gravity, impervious to woe. The twenty years we’ve left (with luck and grace) invisible to her. In her constant now our cardinal sings the mac ‘n cheese is hot. We walk the stones in her backyard our sacred spot. She will have time enough to seek me in rocks and trees when I’m gone. Today she leans against my jeans and turns me briefly immortal.
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PERFECT DAYS
These mornings are it, life’s glory disguised as just another Spring day. Sunshine, leaving for work in the soft air - a bit of traffic, not too much – an easy commute. The sweetness of it, life here and now - The no big deal, the simple day, the normalcy. It’s what I yearn for when life turns cruel to drive over the bridge into town to breathe the smell of the river, to ride down Main Street as cherry trees blossom. Give me a day like that, I think one with no special thoughts or agonies, a day to enjoy my habits with nothing amiss. Sometimes I walk right by them without noticing, these perfect days, driving down Main Street. -
FLYING FREE
To go in a puff of feathers, a glory of days,
Soft as clouds of air
Gone – gone – gone.
There are worse things,
Lying there
Suffering in white sheets – tethered to machines’
Endless beeping – intake and outtake monitors -
The blue of fluorescent lights pulsing about you.
A constant parade of people checking, checking, checking,
Reluctant to let you go in case they might save you.
‘For what?’ is the unasked question.
‘For what – please?’
It’s late in the day for golf.
Americans fear death like quiet.
Both are becoming hard to find.
Shop Rite makes me bless my deafness.
Feathers and glory
It isn’t all bad to explode out of life
Black feathers against a blood moon.
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TREE MAN
Squirrels remind me of a man
I loved, who with rope and spike
mimicked them
climbing trees and swinging
limb from limb.
“They are my brothers”
he said. Came home crying one day
because he crushed a nest,
killed babies, when he felled
an oak.
I stop to watch
a tree man work today.
High in the air he swings
in chain saw ballet. As
I watch him cut, climb
leap from limb to limb,
my young life returns to me.
I see my love without a net
fearless and free
against the sky.
A WELL TRAVELED HEART 