Holding Space

The sons
           and daughters
     who save us 
is a place of music.

I was once a daughter. I came
             with a matchless mother
                       and an anguished father.

They loved me.

I have lost their scent—
             the peace that I gathered
                             from their arms.

     Death separates       
                    u s.

The roasted ache of pain
                               lives inside
the gardens of my chest where I lay them
down with moon & worry,
          lavender & thyme leaven
the bruises touching the night’s flesh.

And, for a  moment, I smell Georgia
from the backdoor of my chest, stacked with melons
where seeds sprout
                                    from a veil
 of my mother’s green thumbs.

I have been holding space

                on a vine of deep breaths.
It’s so dark here.
I   need
            their
                     light.

Remnant Whispers

What happens in the crook of our arms, matters?
We keep resewing the past,
it can’t be undone.

Its crowded voices   echo   in our voices.
The same unanswered night
 still dangles, lifelessly
from the tattered sleeve of remembrance.

Each strand of our threaded bodies,
a remnant whisper from the past.

The ancient umbilical cord still anchors our madness.
These strings that swing in from the distance
want us to let go
want us to heal the ulcers
 that lacerate the soul and its skin.

We must offer
something more than buckling words
that always seem to unbuckle,
we must lay hands on the dead,  
and ask for forgiveness.

Our bent bodies, a stitched dream
from the needle’s narrow light of grace,
a vessel with the intent of mustard seeds
will grow the sun’s sweeten yellows
in our small but massive minds.

What happens in the turning of our mind is crucial,
 is a craved gesture in the field of wild thoughts.
 
We will lighten
 the broken scales,
 the deepen losses that swallow us,
the uneven grass that greens the other side,
the greed that drips a bittered past.
We must return blind and deaf
 with a desperation
to touch and smell
everything
 we cannot see or hear.

Barren

No one is picking
berries tonight,
the edge’s frost
sleeps inside
sprawled branches,
weeping for more
than dark skies—
a room of deep purple
un-warmed,
stained by the beaks of crows,
still hopeful.

My old body,
seedless fruit
stitched from dust,
lonesome,
hanging root,
nothing else
will come
through the crook
of this oblong belly,
not a whisper.

There is no need to push,
the waiting dust curls,
the wilting flowers
falls to earth,
salts the blue pickled veins.
The waiting fathers
do not come here.

This body,
a tree
of swollen
dust
leaves its ambition
in the green leaf.
There is no competition
or vanity here.

I Am the Only One Who Carries the Umbrellas

Today, I surrender. Tomorrow will be a truce.
I wait for day’s end when blue skies switch to black.

I surrender the purple swirls, the opulence a country swears it brings.
I come with nothing.         I take nothing.

Today, I am from nowhere.   I own only one thought,
to burlesque a bird,     to take the feed of robins  to fill a future,    
to use their beady eyes  to watch,     to un-claw a prey,  perch a bench,  
flap a wind,   unswallow worries,   keep the sky,    take deep breaths,  
and when the air consents,      follow a wing  until it fades to blue.
    
Tomorrow, my head will have had time to unravel long enough
to release a bird song,    to empty the unbalanced and the lakes that puddle here.

My buckets are full,         my swallow is full.
I am the only one who carries the umbrellas,    who holds the country at her breasts.

The cities will sleep sound tonight.    I will waive the white flag,
even  before a truce,  before birds call,  before my cup overflows     again.

Your  Face

Your face  at  times is a beautiful  door, stern  and  unwilling. I imagine
your lines are the markings of your living that separates each lover’s war,

Your lips, an altar of whispered flames,    
great men have stood before them and burned.

There is great distance between the eyes of your past and   the eyes of  now, the gold  
that ambers through your iris whispers guilt and shame and  dance like birds do.

Just underneath the moon of your cheeks, a consecrated land still grows,
above  the seam of your cheek, a bone rises in deformity,    fruit peels

the soil recalls the year of the trespassers,
the ones who wandered in by mistake.

Your face, once a beautiful door, now blurred with an antithesis
of lines no longer distinguishable,  only the altar that confesses your soul.

Tender Trimmings

At the beginning,
we look with new eyes
laced in colorless skin,

what we hear is muffled
closely stitched to the knotted past,

the past is an old life that lies awake
at night        worshiping   its own gods.

Let’s place the world inside a tiny room and keep it locked.
            It will hold us to love, to churn until language
                        becomes gentle, candlelit words.

We will forget the wool skin,     the beaded husk,     the iron rind,
we will hold on to such tender trimmings that become a part of us,

We will vaccinate whatever ails us and
give ourselves more than what life and death   knows      of us,

we will come with the wisdom of Shepherds
we will come with the sun, the air and the sacred winds that touch,

we will  speak of the scent of wild jasmine and lavender
and what we ate along the ageless paths,

we will  taste the words that we’ve traveled with,
we will bridge into others and hold up life between one another’s footsteps,

and the loose grains that we’ve gathered and given in this lifetime
where little is  more,    where the tiny bloom’s petaled trimmings
open and close     to begin, again.

© Diane Wilbon Parks, all rights reserved.

 [video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsyyas8RyDQ]