Greetings on this beautiful first day of May. Thanks for opening this email. 🌸
April was national poetry month and my friend Mery Smith, who is the Spokane Poet Laureate had been posting daily prompts for writing poems and I was super inspired! I chose a few to share here.
Most of these I wrote while on a walk around the park with my dog, probably after gasping at the fresh magnolia blooms. Spring really does it for me. I don’t know how to be a poet exactly. Often, I feel like my approach to new creative pursuits is unconventional and untrained. I have a community college graphic design degree lol. Mary Oliver vehemently said to never write poetry digitally. I heard her say it in an interview and man, she sounded serious. Like it was life or death. But still, I write all my poems in the notes app on my iPhone. They are hardly fine tuned. I make few edits after the very first fell swoop. It’s that way for me with songs and art most times as well. I remember my mom saying something like “if you spent a little more time on it, it would be better” as a kid while I would barrel through pages and pages of drawings. That definitely can be true (it almost always is in my work in design). But sometimes for me, the best things come right out when they are ready.
Maybe in five years I will look back and laugh at myself. I usually do. I have found the most important thing about creative practice is that you have to just do it. Waiting until you are good enough at some medium is paralyzing and I find it a vain use of brain space. Like the point of it all is to bring people to their knees? No. Bringing yourself to your own knees is the point. And that does take practice. To cut to your own core. Expose something. Possibly something you knew was there and are choosing to reveal it, or maybe you are uncovering parts of yourself that are new to you. This is the creative muse I invite into my own day to day. It’s something I have carved a very special space out for in my heart where poems seem to meet me.
38
(I suppose at every age there are things we wish we were, places we wish we were, people we wish we could be and we aren’t. That’s what this poem started out about and became a pep talk to myself on my birthday.)
My legs move
One after the other
I start to cry
Single and childless
Older than I ever expected
Like a small child
I distract myself
With the sprite green
Spring buds
The cobalt blues
The cadmium red
The phthalo green
On the canvas
I have so little left
And yet here is this
Life.
All mine.
Women holding things
(The title of this one was the prompt and just made me think of how hard women work at everything. How tense, how fraught, how repressed we can be holding it all together.)
A salve, a birthday gift
Wrapped with thoughtful paper
And little buds stuffed under the twine
A glass, a pill bottle
Forcing a loved one to
Let her ease the pain
A word, a truth only she
Might know and
Knowing that
Holds it tighter and together
She doesn’t know her arms
Are bent here like this
Stiff and clenched.
Straps of totes, hands of child,
Car keys, todo lists, cares
Of the world.
Your heart, your aches,
Love and presence and desire.
When you say, let me…
She cries
When you say, I can…
She is foiled
When you say,
It must be tiring…
She is a puddle
and
You hold her.
Spring’s Song
(I am in love with spring. Every year it feels like I am pulled from the depths of a pit called winter and I fall in love.)
The greens and blues
And renaissance clouds
The cherry blossoms
And bark covered boughs
Of every oak tree
And ever bumble bee
Singing spring’s song
Whether we are young in love
Or love is young in us
Or love is the perennial
That comes back from
What seemed like death
Each and every year.
We all join in this same
Beautiful song
In Love
(I am deep in pondering love of self and role that plays in relational and romantic love. How we hold our own vulnerability and pain and shadows ends up reflected in how we hold another.)
I want that lift you into space love
That dig deep to make it work love
The love that makes tough heavy tears light
The love that is a choice your guts make for you
The ease into it and open up the windows love
I want that step back kind of love
To make sure the brush strokes of love are bold and kind
The kind of love that is desperate
And separate
Changing and steady
Simple and layered
Voraciously unearthed
Preciously protected
I believe it’s not too late
We are all these things in our own love
We are all made of gift and shadow
And there are no returns on this gift
And there is no shadow light will not touch
In love
New Words
(Another love poem. The prompt was “All and everything all at once” which made me reflect on the process and path one takes to know and see another person)
I need you to know
I’m waking up to you
I’m opening my eyes
And there you are.
I want you to know
I’m trying to see inside.
I don’t want to mistake
My ideas
With your trueness.
Misconceive
Your swelling soul soaked
Spirit, and the way you fill
The space of your life—
With the emptiness in mine.
I want to see your
All and everything
All at once.
I want you to know
We could discover new words.
Or unveil the real meaning of words
We think we already know.
Because they now exist here
Between us.
And over the years and days
And kisses, those words
Will become the poetry of our life.
May Events in Spokane
🎨 May 8 live painting at From Here 11am-3pm
🎼 May 17 Playing original tunes at Baby Bar 9pm $10
🎼 May 20 Alcohol & Feelings at Maxwell House 7:30 Free
🎨 May 30 Thursday Market South Perry
I made you a playlist!
If you need some new tunes, I made a little playlist with some fun discoveries recently and new songs by some of my favorite artists. I recommend for a walk or a bike ride.
