the lone swan
flying across
the face of
the moon
like a tear
falling to
the quiet
lonely lake
below

my
heart
the swan
the moon
the lake

and you
forever
gone

Source: The Quiet Lonely Lake

These haiku are over 35 years old

Haiku #9 face in quiet night softly holds the fire glow in her smoky eyes. catching her portrait in gold glistening harvest moon her very essence. she smiles quietly lovely effortlessly free laughi…

Source: Haiku #9

To you newish readers, here is another of my favorite poems, from a couple of years ago…Our Little Hut…dedicated to my Love

Darling, are you awake? Yes? Good…do you remember our beginning? A little hut by the sea wearing grey cedar shingles like feathers ruffled in rainy winds and shot thru with browns and blacks&…

Source: Our Little Hut

Constance…Thank you for your patience with me as I am not writing new things right now…but do I ever, really?

Write new things…

Oh, I catch poems that have not yet been caged in words, and do so with some volume…but I dunno if they are new.

But I am focused on the election, and no, not the candidates…but the story this election is telling about the lurking horror inside so many in this nation, which is the seeds of destruction for so many souls.

In the meantime, enjoy some of the poems from the past as I post them.  You can also check out my FB page…if you are not yet a friend, request me with a message that you read at Grace Notes.  ❤

open me to new ways of looking at old wounds without examining them. give me grace to recreate loving space and mercy great for childhood, home and family. nourish me, here, I belong and have a pla…

Source: Grace Upon Grace

I am re-blogging this old poem, for it is one of my very favorites, and I think it is actually one of my most excellent poems as well.  The metaphors are very full and agile…I wrote about one night in the winery, doing “Evening Punch”, that process where the crushed mass of grape clusters together with the seeds and stems called “must” is pierced over and over again with an implement called a “punch”…

OH!!!  How these things just came alive to me!!  I encourage you to think about things like:

dirt
dirt become flesh
flesh become spirit
silver (color of redemption)
piercing
sweat
blood
in-out-up-down
The Must
The Song/Symphony

As I have commented before, I think wine is the central metaphor that best explains the journey of Life, and the task we are all given.  In that post, I said that a good bottle of wine is the disti…

Source: The Must

Contrast the difference a year makes… Reeling In Rome when the blow of being shunned by flesh and blood was fresh… And the next, the poem below, when I had been born from betwixt the legs of suffering, and becoming…

When you lose the rest of everything and the curb merges with the gutter, wander on down the grey road in the weak darkness, thin and sorry for its skinny powers. Like you, it has been stripped and…

Source: Morning Meditations

Things feel like silk over thistles. My heart is home, snuggled down certain and in place and yet, underneath being home, pulses pain sighs sorrow sings sadness tamborine thistles timbrel thorns cl…

Source: Reeling in Rome

I wrote this to one of my deepest loves… The day after the hardest text I ever heard. Two years later, and it’s still unclear whether this rift will ever be healed, or just stand there gaping and bloody, gawking blindly at the horror of separation…

high strung doesn’t even come close to how high strung i really am… but i lay like the dead lifeless, empty inside, afraid, seeing your departure as the substance of my ugliness and you…

Source: The Girls We Were Without Knowing

One last repost…it is the contrast here of the mountains and the valleys that creates the space in-between…a space that I love to write about.

Edges are not merely the furthest border of a given territory…Edges by definition are their own space, and time and place…transgender people inhabit edges in obvious given ways…but I write as I do, speak as I do so that you can tumble to the fact that all human beings live in “Edges”…

…it is what makes us human.

What are your edges?  Your furthest reaches?
And what “Edge” is that place that is you?

Mama’s words to me are mine.

You told me there would be silences, differences between mountain streams and valley brooks, You told me Your flow was warm, liquid collecting of the gifts and graces of valleys. You said my bracin…

Source: Mama You Told Me

This is my naming poem.  It is one of my very favorite works…I am happy with the allusions, metaphors, the techniques and inferences…the resonances in the poem and the implications of a transwoman being a “half-sister”…

Well, I just love it and I hope that you can find some resonance that echoes to your own life.

words. swallowed in medicine times but found to be only poison slow half-life killers just in time spat out in relief, in apprehension, in hope… i am jacob’s half-sister confessing her …

Source: Jacob’s Half-Sister

This is a re-post of a poem written last year…this goes out to my recent “Constances” who have come round after this poem was composed…I am so honored that you read here and I hope this poem rings a bell within.

When light fades in upside down slow burn that looks like sunset when it’s actually just God’s Hand on your heart Their dimmer switch of love spinning round on and off… brighter…

Source: Love And Breath