In Verses & Song

  For National Poetry Month, here’s a new poem and new reviews of poetry books I’m reading! I hope you’ll be inspired to read and share poems, and maybe write some of your own.  *** Click Here to Listen to the Reading of My Poem Below Awake and Dreaming There’s a sleepiness in the sun’s rays, a soft warmth in this hour. Day settling in, wrapping me in a cloak of light. A hush is broken  by chitters, high and low-voiced calls from hidden singers in tall trees.  I think of the cat, her black outline stretched across the couch in sleep,  consider the habits and dreams of nocturnal creatures. How my brain  kept buzzing, thoughts twisting and turning overnight, blankets tangled,  sheets bunched. How like a prowling creature I became, awake  and wandering like the cat mewing at 3:30am. How in the brightness of day these nocturnal moments seem an alternate universe, not the same one t hat spins with a tapestry of white cloud stitched on blue sky. Not the same one where birdsong lingers, wind-

Tenderness of fields , painting by Elena Artstyle,  pixels.com In soft slips of blooms In cool mists of morning In silver whispers of song In pink presses of lips   In our arms encircling In our fingers lacing   In our eyes wondering In our voices laughing      In rivers flowing wide In clouds breaking open   In boundless breath of skies   In limitless light of stars   In spring bursting into blossoms In wings rising in golden sunshine       In our hands lifting to brilliant blue In how earth is enfolding us     In how love is rebirthing us   In how hope is carrying us      In how we walk together In how we fly together Copyright @Stacie Eirich March 4, 2024 *** Listen to this poem & discussion on Spotify at the link below:  Poetry for Peace, Season 4: A New Dawn, Episode 8: Tenderness This poem is another that came with the dawn, with another morning of waking, of rising, of moving, of writing, and of hoping. Our steps forward into life after my child’s cancer are still tentative

  Claude Monet (1840–1926), Spring, 1886, oil on canvas, 64.8 x 80.6 cm, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.  Public domain image. I turn the pages sideways write across across rather than down — a horizon of light rather than rush of rainfall. Listen to the melody of strings sliding through air, a shifting in my soul with the rising of a cello. Its solo, melancholic and strong an ascending scale climbing rungs of branches to light. A soft break-through a quiet opening of clouds to the music of hopefulness, of humanity’s heart — our hearts born of nature’s breath. The breath that holds in it wings and bones and histories of time: the knowledge of all life, all creatures. The breath that wraps us in warmth, covers us in cold. It is silent, then whispers, then sings the song of a nightingale. Soft and dark, rising into fluttering wind lifting before the dawn. What is this music within us since birth the music that rises with the sun the call of a lark echoing across blue feathered skies?

Wake to your voice saying “Mama, Mama”, to your slender arm  reaching inside the blankets, body shivering in cold gray light.  Wake to you slipping in beside me, telling me your head aches  that the dizziness has returned.  Wake to your touch curling against me, to the soft, dark fuzz  atop your head, to you folding beneath my arms.  Feel the pulse of your heartbeat in mine, our breath rising and falling,  my cheek resting against the nape of your neck.  Feel the flutter of your body against the cold, our bones shivering  into the warmth of each other like caterpillars wrapping themselves into cocoons.  Feel the warmth of time unspooling itself around us, our skin  spinning slower, wider, deeper until the whirl is quieted.  Listen to the shush of breeze outside, to the way light  plays on the windows, stretching to meet our fingers.  Listen to the rustle of the blankets, to the movement  of your long limbs stretching out beyond mine.  Listen to your voice assuring me “I’m alright now,

In the living room, letters spell LOVE   in bright cherry red, the color of lipstick mothers wore in the eighties  of dragon’s blood snowballs  of a shade we once favored when dressing  to go out and dance.  But the color in this space  feels more like  blue-gray, like the spray  of ocean salt, like the touch of rainfall, like something  not as tidy, not as shiny. What does the world know  of these letters of this room  this family, this moment  of this  our hearts —- Let's paint it in lush purples deep greens and wavy blues  fill it with ripples zigzags, silly stripes, funky dots  break apart its letters build them anew.  Pull it wide open, create a nest  of its fragments — then maybe that  thing with wings   will fly in perch upon this new  love/LOVE/LoVe/lOvE/LOve/loVE in all its messy, magnificent  multi splendored glory. Perhaps then this room will feel  like a place we know  a place where  love looks back at us, winking  because love  knows us because love  loves us because l