Words I read years ago keep coming back
to calm me at the most opportune times.
Helping my parents pack for their return
back to their homeland after forty years,
my sadness lifted, murmuring a line
from Yeats, That is no country for old men.
When my niece told me she was marrying
a young man I wish I thought better of,
I almost said—but bit my tongue in time—
When lovely woman stoops to folly.
As Mom lay dying and I saw the light
receding from her eyes, the phrase popped up,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
and I felt comforted as if my grief
could be contained within that mournful line,
and yet I mourned the deeper for that line.
Often I crack and poetry seals the crack,
I’ve glued many a heartbreak with the phrase,
After so many deaths, I live and write!
which sets me up to love and lose again!
Unlike my Buddhist friends I’ve never found
solace in silence. Sorry, but I love
the way words say what can’t be said in words.
We fall and a brief quatrain breaks our fall.
A villanelle recalls us to ourselves.
I’m buoyed by poems that spring upon my lips
like prayers mothers whisper over cribs.
The winds of time would carry me away
but for the words which when my life breaks down
rise up and clap their hands and louder sing!