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