Category: Gratitude

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February Open Write: Love Poems Inspired by Black Poets

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Donnetta Norris of Texas is our host today at http://www.ethicalela.com with a LOVEly invitation for this Saturday morning in February to kick off this month’s Open Write. You can read her full prompt and poem here. Her Paul Laurence Dunbar-inspired poem Invitation to Love in turn inspired me to mirror a poem by a favorite black poet. I love so many – Jericho Brown, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Clint Black, and many more – – but of course, Lucille Clifton captures my soul in every poem. I fell in love with blessing the boats (at St. Mary’s)when its final line was chosen for the National Poetry Month theme a couple of years ago. She inspired me to lower case my letters in an e.e. cummings style, and I have been doing that ever since in most poems I write. Here is Clifton’s mentor poem I took from The Poetry Foundation as my inspiration for the prayer poem I wrote today:

blessing the boats
                  (at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back  may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

Here is my prayer poem, filled with love:

blessing the children (and theirs)

may these prayers
offered each morning
whispered Heavenward
from the Rav4 road to work
(my prayer chamber)
multiply exponentially
with peace, health, safety,
sobriety, love, joy, provision, and
all good things
may these intercessions
meet you where you are and
keep you in God’s grace
may they stir in your heart
blessing you and yours
with a holy head kiss
divine in all love
lingering through the years
forever

Amen.

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Let Them!

First, I checked the library, and there were dozens on the waiting list for the ebook and the audiobook. It would be months before it would be available.

Then, I checked my local bookstore in my small town. They were all sold out.

I kicked myself. I’d had my hand on a copy in a mega bookstore two weeks ago and had put it back, thinking I’d wait and either check it out to read it for free or support my small town bookstore instead of purchasing it right then and there. as I’d really wanted to do – to dive into it and lose myself in the words and the affirmations and head-nodding I knew would happen in those chapters. Lessons I needed and lessons I already knew.

Then came the first phone call. My husband’s brother’s wife, whom I still call my own sister-in-law and who’d read the book after she’d written her own on a similar topic just months before, had good things to say.

Then the second phone call. My brother’s wife, too, was in the thick of chapter 4 and couldn’t put it down.

I hung up and ordered a copy, which arrived on Saturday morning. By Saturday afternoon, I was halfway finished – and my husband had been as interested as I was once it arrived, so I used an Audible credit to download it so he could listen as I read (note: the Audible version, read by the author, doesn’t follow the book exactly – – it’s like an engaging conversation, and it pulled us both right in).

And here we are, all the better, with a new mindset.

I’ll let them do it.

I won’t try to persuade them.

I’ll mind my business.

I’ll stay in my lane.

I’ll flash my own turn signals.

I’ll drive my own car.

I’ll map my own route.

I’ll schedule my own detours.

I like scenic routes.

I’m out of the fray.

I’m not making their choices.

They’ll have to do that.

.

.

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When She Comes Calling

I worry about this one

this sweet little fawn who

used to have a twin

when they

still

had

spots

we’d watched them

from the window

for weeks

clumsily playing

beside mama

just yards

from our front door

near the edge

of the woods

before spotting one

crumpled on the road

near the driveway

near their

dense thicket

and now this one

with her rumpled rump fur

comes calling

alone

so close

to the house

as if she’s trying

to

say

something

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Flat Ollie: A Skinny Poem

Have you ever seen a dog that can flatten himself right into a chair, a bed, or the floor? If our Ollie were a poem, he’d be a skinny poem. He could win an upside-down limbo contest and beat a snake at it.

he flattens out

Ollie

rescued

schnoodle

skinny

Ollie

abandoned

neglected

adopted

Ollie

he flattens out

Taken from The Skinny Poetry Nation blog: The “Skinny” is a short poem form that consists of eleven lines. The first and eleventh lines can be any length (although shorter lines are favored). The eleventh and last line must be repeated using the same words from the first and opening line (however, they can be rearranged). The second, sixth, and tenth lines must be identical. All the lines in this form, except for the first and last lines, must be comprised of ONLY one word. The Skinny was created by Truth Thomas in theTony Medina Poetry Workshop at Howard University.

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Boo Radley (Boo Badly)

We live in the middle of a forest. These massive pine trees surround our home on all sides and shelter us deep in the woods, basically cut off from any form of civilization. We have to get dressed and venture into society to see other living, breathing human souls. What used to be a fully operating cattle farm has been, little by little over the years, turned from cow pasture to pine tree farm – which is why, when I tell my work friends that I must go home and walk the dogs sometimes at lunch, I am met with blank stares. They don’t understand that when I say I live on the Johnson Funny Farm, this basically translates to the Johnson Wayward Wildlife Jungle.

We never know what we’re going to see, and we can’t take risks that our pack of house Schnoodles won’t go chasing anything that moves. Two of the three must be on leashes at all times.

Except Boo Radley~

his dad gives him a leash pass

(doesn’t see the need)

He saw it last night, for the second time in two weeks.

I’d just gone to bed and gotten settled to try to figure out Wordle at the end of a long day that included a two-hour extension to help with registration at our high school when I heard my husband frantically yelling Boo’s name. I sprang up, careful not to slip down on the wood floors after just putting the magnesium cream on my feet to help me sleep better, making it to the closet to get my slippers. I knew instinctively this would require entry into the thicket.

Sure enough, Boo Radley had taken off and was marking territory at the bottom of a pine tree, where once again he’d treed a coon. This happened for the first time less than two weeks ago, but here we were again, another (or maybe the same) frightened raccoon staring down into the high beam of our flashlight, wondering what kind of dogs we are raising in this house.

He gets proud of himself and tries to sport the Alpha Dog swagger after a thing like this, but it’s all lies. He is not the alpha anymore, and he knows it deep inside. He’s just obnoxious.

Take this morning, for example. I’m generally the first one up, and so I take the boys out around 5:00. They usually go right off the edge of the walkway and do their morning business, and it takes less than two minutes………until Boo decides to go over by the gardenia bush and gets wrapped around the birdbath and pulls it over, completely full, right at my feet. I was grateful it was not the block of ice it was two weeks ago.

Still, I laugh at the comedy of it all. We’ve often wondered why Boo was abandoned, needing rescue in his younger years. He isn’t an easy dog by any means…….but we love him, and if it weren’t for him and his brothers and all the wayward wildlife critters who wander up and want to be a part of life here, we wouldn’t be able to call it the Johnson Funny Farm.

You gotta be a little sideways to end up here.

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Next Steps Nonet

Boo Radley and Ollie where the new house will be

today we take the next steps toward

building our barndominium

it’s all part of the process

in our retirement plan ~

simplify, downsize,

anticipate

ease in days

ahead

now

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Odd Text Day

she began early

random odd texts

throughout her day

photos of soap

rainbow sherbet dreams

mushroom coffee moments

just a prank

to bring smiles

and endless laughter

My daughter sent me a reel earlier this week with some girl on Instagram saying that she was going to send her brother random boring, senseless updates by text the following day – things no one would care about, really. So my older daughter decided to do the same for her own brother. That’s what happened today. I woke to photos of the random texts and spent a day with the best medicine – – laughter!

She has her next “victim” in sight, and I can’t wait!

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Grounding Nonet

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I am one with Mother Earth, my feet

grounded in the rich, fertile soil

footprints leaving impressions

as the pores of my soles

pour into my soul

the lifebeats of

universe

pulsing

up