Haven

This is their place -
the free, the wild ones.
Here I stay by their grace
for renewal when I come.

You wonder that I say I miss them
when they're called by instinct to depart.
True - I've never touched or held them.
Yet free creatures swell my heart.
These foxes, eagles, flocks of swans -
this place of pause from the race we're on.

This Holy Week

April 10, 2020, Good Friday

Surely this tough Easter week
in my bit of the beleaguered world
is potent for poetry-making.

A famously afflicted family
is on vigil at my bay house
for their tender ones gone missing
in the Eden of our shared retreat.
Mother and child both drowned
in pursuit of a ball;
taken by turbulent Spring forces -
high winds churning the Chesapeake.

Long search in the deep
for this innocent pair, submerged -
fallen needlessly
into the stricken generations
of their famous clan.

But no! ... not this noble child,
not his brave and splendid mother.
A cousin in angry mourning cries:
No! This time God got it wrong.

*

Stay away, on the periphery of grief.
Don't seek my wild escape
from pandemic captivity in town.
There's no need to retrieve our family's
silver goblets or the Seder plate.
For our people can't gather this year
in ancient ritual to commemorate
being saved.

I am charged, please,
to celebrate through portraits
these two "as they were in sunshine"
prays her father/his grandfather
from an abyss of grief.

Hoping for help
with a tall order at the easel,
I pored last night till late
through hundreds of photos
of young family life so sweet.
Hours of exercise in heartbreak.

Portraits of these two
I may be unable to paint.

*

Along the shore now
a goose and gander
begin their nesting ritual
on open ground.
Ospreys have returned
to build up high
for their new generation.

Ars Poetica

POEM …

  Where is your source?
  How are you shaped?
  What is your power?

  You come from within,
  a mystical mining of
  memory and discernment.
  Emergence not linear,
  early form being fluid.

  As we find our way,
  as you take your stand,
  to me you are saying:

  This is true.
  This sounds right.
  Let me sing.

Muscle

I found a sack of youthful letters
that were neither written nor kept
for much reason.
Many from boys in our circle away at school,
nothing much on their minds.
Except I guess to let me know that I was,
by sharing some empty quotidian moment.

Finding these late in life,
I was surprised by the practice
of such triviality being recorded, stamped, and sent.
Still, I guess I was pleased to receive
the From and To on the envelope.
Today, one would hardly
dial a cell phone to say
not much is happening today.

You and I, friend,
wrote seldom.
But our correspondence was important.
We would reach out
to share an insight, seek an opinion,
or, by the writing,
elicit our own thoughts.

Half a century later I recall
working through a tough experience,
laboring over a letter late at night
to tell you about a man
I was seeing then at the university.

His foreign background not only differed
from mine, but was anathema to me.
He was intense and intelligent,
but alien by more than birth.
Orphaned son of an SS officer;
his family had murdered mine.

I tried to understand how that could be
by trying to understand this man.
I told you I was using muscles
I'd never had to exercise before.
I think I was telling you
that I was growing up.

Spirals

Opening one to the other
helpless in
sweetest excitement,
how deeply
our hearts enfolded -
irresistibly.

What has happened
that now we unspool
tripping misstep
by unruly misstep,
spinning apart -
inexorably.

Sounding

How is it that words can be revelatory?
A person's scrawl or spoken sound
a term or phrase or story
conveys an understanding. The magic is profound.

This question is at least two-fold:
the talent in humanity
through language to unfold
bonds of knowing, our common capacity.

How is thought transmitted by word
whether written and read
or spoken and heard
that we're moved to awareness by what someone said?

Our connection is strongest - enlightenment sown
when words we receive unveil what we've known.

Poems ©  Sandy Jackson Cohen, 2024. All rights reserved.