poetry

feeding america

Oatmeal, walnuts, sugar

Mother Earth, sunshine, and rain

in my breakfast bowl

Did you know 1 in 6 military and Veteran families experience food insecurity? Many of these families are forced to choose between paying their bills or putting food on the table.

During a research project for a sociology class while an undergraduate at San Diego City College in 1982, I was stunned to learn that many enlisted Navy Families relied on Food Stamps to feed their families. I found myself questioning then and again now the justification for service personnel whose lives are on the line for all of us to be experiencing food insecurity.

I recently learned that Navy Federal Credit Union is partnering with Feeding America to get more meals to those in need in the military community. With a little help from augmented reality (AR), you can join them in their mission to help combat hunger for Veteran and military families

sunday morning with akazome emon

I can no longer tell dream from reality.

Into what world shall I awake.

From this bewildering dream? ~Akazome Emon*

Akazome Emon (956-1041) was a member of the great group of women poets, roughly contemporary with Murasaki and the author of the Eiga-Monogatari, the story of the supremacy of the Fujiwara, an unusual type of book for a Japanese woman to write at any time.

*cited: Trans and Edited by K Rexroth and I Atsumi. The Burning Heart Women Poets of Japan.

skyscape’s twilight

When the swallows returned last year they made their nest in the embroidery room. They gathered clay from the flower-garden, and scattered dust over harp and books.

When the swallows returned this year, no one heard their twittering speech. She who had rolled up the screen for them was there no more… in the amber twilight a soft pattering rain.~Hsin Ch’i-chi*

Hammad Rais‘ Weekend Sky

*cited: Trans. Anonymous. The Jade Flute Chinese Poems in Prose. The Project Gutenberg Ebook of The Jade Flute.

awakened memories

chasing memories

awakened by spring’s breezes

melting icicles

“Outside my window the world is dove gray…a late spring snow … powdered snow covering tree branches like the powdered sugar she sprinkled on the top of one layered cakes.  

The silence of snow gently interrupted, ‘Why was I sent to that school with Donna?’  Donna, her first born.  A black and white framed photograph reminds me of the softness of her permanent like curls crowning her head and the same unabashed joy of our mother…our mother before she was our mother.  The photograph belies her strawberry blond curls…golden tipped curls.  

‘“So she would not be alone.’  Alone…the same aloneness that accompanied her during those years she was separated from her family…sent away to school?  

“Me, the second born…given a purpose at birth, A playmate… a barrier, a protector against being alone.  

“There were those nights when darkness became like a blanket that settled the house into a quiet silence.  A silence that opens a door to a private passage to a realm where thoughts and images become ethereal and reality is colored by the imaginings of self free to roam.  And then…unexpectedly, consciousness shifts to a gentle voice, “ring ring” responded to with, “hello.”  Uninterrupted exchanges between sisters, separated by darkness—confiding, sharing, questioning—creating private night time stories lulling us into sleep.  

…

“My mother’s grief  … her felt emptiness … her loss of her first born child and first born grandson…together in one grave…not alone. Her emptiness hidden within a Sanskrit word, Vilomah…against the natural order…a parent whose child has died.  A Vilomah who, in later years, would also be a parent whose two sons had died.”*

*cited: b c kofford, My Mother came to Visit