Friday, August 10, 2012

Poems

I don't write poetry anymore, which makes me sad sometimes.    I don't know where the poems went.............but it's good sometimes to open old journals and remember younger selves.........



Yellow Sails   

Your fey mark 
glows on your forehead
a brand, a signature.

I have covered you
with my own tokens, with kisses
embedded in you like tattoos, 
each one says

"remember me, remember me"

although I know you won't.
They will dissolve more quickly than memory
in whatever stream
bears you off.

Never really touching you,
still, I regret nothing.
You are that which is worthy,
the pale light of another landscape
a castaway.

I will remember you
as you are now:
a boat, sailing into some brave distance
your yellow sails spread
gladly
on the horizon.


Lauren Raine
1982

 
IN PRAISE OF WATERS

How are we turned
again and again
to find ourselves moving
into the shadowland
where our best and finest intentions
drift out of true,
and into the truly opposite?

   Love becomes hate
   hope turns into despair
   inspiration hardens into dogma.

Perhaps,
we must find our faces again
in dark waters
revealed among fallen leaves,
our reflected sins,
our cherished scars,
the dappled shapes of light and dark
that surface toward a whole.

There is something that wants us to open
Something that pours from the crevices
where we have broken

Something that laughs like a river in the morning

(1997)
         THE RUNE OF ENDING

What can be said, now,
when all words are spent
and the word has finally been spoken

we go now to our separate houses
relieved - at least,
a course has been named.

Our lives are severed, our story is told.

We will each surely tell that story, and  laugh
and talk late into the night, and kiss lips and thighs salty
with tears and love;
but not with each other,
not again.

Here the tearing ends, here ends remorse and reprisal,
here end dreams and plans.

We will not travel to Scotland, to walk among imagined
monoliths in the white mists of our imagination.
We will not walk again on a warm beach in Mexico,
toasting each other with margaritas.
That was once.  It has to be enough.

I will not call you mine,
You will not call me yours.
And our cat is now your cat, our teapot is now my teapot.
I touch a potted plant, remembering its place
on our breakfast table.
We divide the spoils, humane, courteous, fair.

A canyon has opened between us, we are each old enough
to know its name, to view its depths without passion.
There is no bridge to cross this time.

Beloved, I must now forgive myself,
and you,  cast my stone into this abyss
and bless the ghost woman

who has not yet come
to stand by your side
wave with grace from across the canyon's lip
then turn, and walk my own path.

1997

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

These are beautifully written. Thank you for sharing them.