Tag: poetry reading

Soul Sunday

Good morning, my treasured readers. Regular readers know that I devote Sundays to poetry. I either write a poem or a share a poem written by someone else. Today’s poem has been written by me, this morning. I strongly encourage you to write a poem today (it’s cathartic) and if you would like, please share it in my Comments section. My blog is a safe and loving space, I assure you. Have a lovely Sunday.

The Turtle

Last night’s dream was so magical and intriguing.

It involved an ancient home which had been restored to greatness.

Most every room was purely white, marbled marble,

And you had to take a ride to view the house’s mysterious interiors,

Filled with towering towers and statuesque stairways,

But my favorite part of the ride is when I got to you,

the part which everyone seemed to know that I would love.

The whiteness stopped and there was a huge, golden, flowing pond.

And your enormous, moss covered shell rose to the surface.

It was breathtaking to see the largest turtle I have ever seen, anywhere.

I wasn’t afraid. I was in awe. You were incredible. You were shockingly amazing.

I don’t often remember my dreams, so this morning, it felt important

And necessary to understand your meaning to me,

The Dream Dictionary, told me this:

“Seeing a giant turtle, in your dream is a good sign, denoting that, you are protected by your friends and family and thus, no need to get worried about anything in life.”

“Thank you for the reminder, gorgeous turtle,” I whispered, with a sheepish smile.

“Thank yourself. Your dreams come from you.” you replied. “And so do I.”

And then, you plunged down to the deepest depths again,

Leaving the surface of my mind in a still and tranquil state,

As I began another day, assured and hopeful and loved and protected,

Knowing that my shell of loved ones, always keeps me safeguarded and secure.

Soul Sunday

It is poetry workshop day, here at Adulting – Second Half. Yesterday was a day of highs and lows. I was thrilled with the successful launch of the space shuttle! Such a nerve-wracking yet exciting, prideful event to watch! Still, my heart felt very heavy with all of the pain our country is going through with these horrible, unjustified killings. I wrote today’s poem, yesterday, from a very emotional place. Please fill my Comments with your poems. It is great release.

For the Love of our Sons

To my sisters who are “mamas” of big, strong, handsome, young black men,

We share the “mama” part, we mamas of sons, but your burdens are greater than mine.

You and I worry about our boys’ health, and opportunities and decisions and loves,

But you also worry that the people who are supposed to protect our boys, might instead

Destroy them.

You have to teach your boys a lesson, I would never even conceive of,

You must teach your sons that they are often considered guilty suspects by their very appearance, and you must teach your sons to be wary of the people who I have casually taught my sons to mostly trust.

Dear mama, my sister in motherhood, my heart aches for you. Being a mother is such a vulnerable position to be in, from the minute we feel our babies growing inside of us,

we love them intensely . . . with everything we have.

You and I are no different in that regard. I know this with my whole, bare heart. Your heart beats for your children, as my heart beats for mine. Do our unveiled hearts look very much the same? I imagine that they do. Love is love.

A mother’s heart brims with Love. An overflowing Love is what a mother’s heart is made of.

But I have less worry, less burden than which you must carry with you every day.

You hold yourself with such dignity and pride and strength and a serene knowing-ness, which I so admire,

Yet I know that I could probably never, ever replicate your beautiful countenance.

Mostly because I’ve never had to try.

You must need that beautiful, intense, impenetrable armor of yours, to shield your heart. But honestly, how much distress can a heart hold before it breaks and shatters and bursts, the lovely, steely container that holds it?

I don’t carry your burdens. I understand that. I know that neither of us should have to carry anything. Our hearts should be light of load, as we carry out the request of the Universe, to nurture our precious sons into manhood.

I don’t carry your burdens. I can never fully understand. I won’t disrespect you, by pretending I know how you feel.

But I can offer you my heart and my hand and my arms to rest in. I can offer you my prayers. I can offer you my careful consideration in all of the choices that I make and the lessons I impart, which help to form this Life which we are all living in. Together.

We are co-creating this world together, all of us, and I want all of our sons to experience the complete fullness that their lives have to offer. This is what uplifts the world. When your son benefits, so does mine. When your heart is light, so is mine.

When your daughters have baby sons, I want your daughters to feel as nonchalant as I do, when teaching her boys about authority figures. I want that lesson to be a minor footnote and not of much concern. I want the beautiful wonderment of life to be the focus of her teachings. Mamas shouldn’t have to teach fear and defensiveness and undue submissiveness to their beloved children.

This outpouring is my long way of saying, please don’t think that I don’t care. I do care. I care very much. I want this sadness, despair and anger and travesty to end. I want this racism to be over now. I want all of our children to experience a life free of racism. I want racism to be thing of dusty history books, an account that is so shocking to our grandchildren, that they can barely comprehend how these injustices existed.

Dear sister in motherhood,

Tell me what I can do to help unload the burden of your pain.

Sincerely signed, a mama of big, strong, handsome, young white men

Sunday Soul

Hi readers. I’m terribly sorry to be late posting today. Sundays are a big readership day for me and I appreciate that fact. I think people like poetry more than they pretend to like it. I’m late because I got myself involved in a “little” painting job this weekend. I decided to paint some window panes. The job seemed simple and painless, enough. Ha! I decided to complete the finishing touches this morning before the hot Florida sun baked even more dark bronze-y paint into my skin. I look like a leopard.

New readers, Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. Poetry is the unedited, free-flowing sounds of our souls. I already got my creative juices out by painting this morning, so I am going to reprint a poem today, that you may have seen already. The poem has gone viral and many believed that it was written by an author during the 1919 Pandemic. Alas, this is not true. It was actually written in March of 2020 by a chaplain from Wisconsin named Kitty O’Meara. It is untitled and it is beautiful. Please add your poems (your writings or someone else’s writings) to the Comments section. Here is the lovely words of a very much alive, Kitty O’Meara:

By Kitty O’Meara
And the people stayed home.
And read books, and listened, and rested,
and exercised, and made art, and played games,
and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And listened more deeply.
Some meditated, some prayed, some danced.
Some met their shadows.
And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant,
dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again,
they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully,
as they had been healed.

Soul Sunday

Fortune for the day -“One who seeks knowledge must desire from a young age to hear the entire truth.” – Plato

Sundays are poetry workshop days, here at Adulting – Second Half. I hope that you are sitting comfortably, maybe even cozily wrapped in a blanket. I hope that you have a delicious, warm cup of tea or coffee, readily available, in order to warm your hands, and your heart. I hope that, in this very moment, you feel surrounded by peace, comfort, acceptance and love. I hope that, right now, in this very place in time, you are in your sacred space.

Here is my poem for today, and as always, please feel the courage, the inclination, the vulnerability and the inspiration, to share your own poems in the Comments section. One day, I hope that this poetry workshop of ours, is “Standing Room Only.” It’s our creative impulses, that come out from within the deepest part of ourselves (without demeaning censure coming from ourselves or from others), that drive this world forward – a beautiful world, which we are all co-creating together. Be free. Be open. Be real. Be alive. Don’t waste another second, in a precious day of your life on anything less than your purest, kindest authenticity. You, and our world, will be uplifted for your effort, and yet also the effortlessness it takes for you to be, your purest, truest self.

Melange

If my things were to represent my mind,

My mind would be chaotic, and in disarray.

Jumping from lucky symbols, to memories captured in the form of photographs,

Piles of inspirations, and numbered orderly logs, laid out in disorderly fashion.

Objects that touched my heart, at the very instance that I laid eyes on the piece,

For no particular rhyme or reason, perhaps just deeply primal.

The compilation of it all, makes no sense to the untrained eye.

But to me, it is a beautiful, nonsensical pattern,

A medley, an assortment, that makes perfect sense.

The inner me, coming forth in physical form.

Amusing, interesting, cluttered, muddled, yet clear.

A hodgepodge in harmony.

Soul Sunday

Fortune for the day: “What seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be.” – William Blake

Let’s get to the poetry workshop part of the day! Here’s mine, please put your stream of thoughts, in poetic form, in the Comments section. Thank you, Carla, for joining in last Sunday. I deeply wish that our poetry forum would get more poetic in 2020, so that we have many interesting, thought provoking poems to read and to interpret and to feel and to connect with, on our Soul Sundays, that we share here at Adulting- Second Half. This is firmly a no-judgment zone. I have veto power and I will not allow any hate on my blog forum. Poetry comes from love, from vulnerability, from the deepest understanding of life that sometimes cannot be put into ordinary prose. Poetry does NOT come from fear and hate. Again, here’s my poem for the day:

The Mind

The most outrageous adventures

Most often take place in the far corners of our own mind.

It is fascinating that a place of comfort and reprieve

Can also be a berth of agonizing hell,

In the flip of a switch of an ordinary, random thought.

If a thought is allowed to continue and to grow and to repeat itself,

It becomes a prison cell, a sorceror holding a hypnotist’s ball and chain,

Creating a trance and a falsehood of reality, that overtakes the soul.

If we can stand back with bemusement and detachment,

The mind is often nothing more than a scatterbrained child,

Changing continually, with the winds of whimsy.

Just for fun, it likes to see how far reaching its thoughts can take us,

evoking deep, primitive emotions that stir wild energy,

intense energy, flowing throughout and reaching every cell

of sometimes the entire physical body.

The one thing that the mind doesn’t ever care to be . . . .

is quiet.

Soul Sunday

(shhhh. Let’s do our poetry thing today, like we do every Sunday. Let’s not just read each other’s words. Let’s feel them.)

GODSPEED

As a mama, I’ve been practicing the art

of letting go

From the moment you were born.

The little good-byes . . . .

A tender kiss goodnight,

As I placed you in your crib.

The brave wave,

At the door of the preschool.

Your first sleepover,

Your first camp weekend,

Your first school trip, out of state,

Your first year at college,

Your study abroad experience,

Your college graduation,

Leading you to your adult life.

A grand adventure, for sure.

I found you little red curls from your first haircut,

the other day.

They were so tiny, and silky, and new.

I tucked them away, like I do with so many of my memories,

and my emotions, which are large and coarse and timeless.

I don’t want to make you feel lonely or sad or scared,

when we do another good-bye at the airport today.

I’m proud that we have both done what we are supposed to do.

Me, relinquishing, proudly. (bravely)

You, going on with your journey. (confidently)

Both of us. (courageous and bold and loved)

Soul Sunday

Sundays are all about the rhymes. Soul Sundays are poetry workshop days here at Adulting – Second Half. Let’s have fun with this! Please share your poems, your poetry, your songs, your raps, your ditties. Here’s my goofy one today:

My Little Old Mug

Oh my little mug

I wish I could give you a hug

For all of the pleasure that you’ve given me.

Instead I must throw you out

Since I’m always spouting about

Not becoming a hoarder.

My daughter pointed out your age and your cracking

Which means your drink holding ability is lacking

And there is really no point in keeping you.

As the family chimed in, about my reminding them of expiration dates,

Handing them Goodwill bags to fill, giving their old things new fates,

I just couldn’t be hypocritical.

Little mug, I considered hiding you away

To sneak you out on a “by myself” day,

But my conscious just wouldn’t let me do it.

Thank you for your service and for the joy that you brought me,

Your humor, your size, your years of holding my coffee

Perhaps you are truly ready for mug heaven.

(or the back hidden corner of the cupboard which no one uses – see you soon!)

Sunday Soul

After the Holiday

It is time for the introspection.

It is time for the resolution.

It is time for the digestion . . .

In the body, but also in the mind . . .

And in the soul.

It is time to clean up the messes. All of them.

It is time to post the happy moments in the memory books . . .

The memory books that you can touch and the ones that just echo in your heart and can be recalled whenever you ask them to, or even when

you don’t.

It is time for the integration of another full experience into the essence of the creation that you call your life.

Was it like what was in your anticipation and imagination? Or did you let the celebration be free to be whatever it was supposed to be for you?

The culmination has arrived and it has passed.

The rumination has begun. It will pass, too.

Completion. Resignation. Fascination. Satisfaction. Appreciation.

Ascension.

The old, but somehow also new and slightly different routine . . .

Awaits.

Okay, readers, you know the drill. Sunday is poetry play day. Please don’t leave me hanging up here. I am so new, unskilled, and apprehensive, messing around with this poetry thing. Yet, it intrigues the hell out of me. We are doing this workshop style, so please post in the Comments section, the words that you are hammering and mixing around, the very thoughts that are stretching and flowing in your fascinating, interesting, free-flowing minds. This is a safe place. I promise. I have veto power over any hateful comments. Plus, there are no hateful comments, because you are all so much more talented, creative, fun, giving, spirited that you ever give yourself credit for, ever. So give your ingenuity away to people who will treasure it, in a way that you can’t. It deserves to be acknowledged and enjoyed.

Happy December!!