From A Prayer the Body Makes...
Healing the Wound With Honey
~Numerous studies have shown that difficult-to-heal wounds respond well to honey dressings.
It must have been inflicted in another life,
this wound we can’t remember, not even sure
whose it may have been. Sometimes we feel
a rift in the flesh needing stitches, or a wound
of the spirit that even the heavy blue dressing
of the sky can’t fix—an invisible fissure in the
heart or brain, cradled in our arms like a refugee
child too damaged to weep.
.
Sometimes we hear the bees whose sting is less
important than their task of filling the comb
for the queen, or the beekeeper in his white suit
and gloves, humming back at the hive.
We each have a job to do—the bees to gather
nectar and transform it into honey, the beekeeper
to steal the pot of gold. And what is our work,
we who need to learn the art of scars?
We must learn the names of honey, give its
sticky sweetness to our tongues, fill our
cupped hands with healing, and offer it to the
ancestors of our still open wounds.
When I Taught Her How to Tie Her Shoes
A revelation, the student
in high school who didn’t know
how to tie her shoes.
I took her into the book-room, knowing
what I needed to teach was perhaps more
important than Shakespeare or grammar,
guided her hands through the looping,
the pulling of the ends. After several
tries, she got it, walked out the door
empowered. How many lessons are like
that—skills never mastered in childhood,
simple tasks ignored, let go for years?
This morning, my head bald from chemotherapy,
my feet farther away than they used to be
as I bend to my own shoes, that student
returns to teach me the meaning of life:
to simply tie the laces and walk out
of myself into this sunny winter day.
Poems
"In the Dark" - Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry Series
"A Prayer the Body Makes" - Persimmon Tree
"The Lens of Fire" - Valparaiso Poetry Review
"The Resonance Around Us" - The Quotable Lit
"Undone" - Visual Artists Collective
"Shelling Peas" - Silver Birch Press
"Peat Bog Woman" - Contemporary American Voices
"One Bowl" - Jama's Alphabet Soup
"Moon-Seeking Soup" - Jama's Alphabet Soup
"Marmalade" - Jama's Alphabet Soup
"Your Grandmother's Whisk" - Jama's Alphabet Soup
Three Poems - Poets for Living Waters
Many more poems HERE for your reading pleasure.