Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
Reconcile: from the Latin reconciliare (to bring together again), from re (again) + conciliare (to make friendly, conciliate)
Dead grasses hide the cityscape.
Death becomes life becomes
A continual process we forget
because we are all about now,
all about the waters poured
into us from birth, our own water
no longer the sea that shapes us. Continue reading “Reconciliation”
An absence of darkness that runs through light,
The shape of a second thought borne on dreams,
The tailwind of the world’s desire breathes
Its tortured wisdom into the dead land
Whose birth is easing out winter’s decay
With the slime of greenness more scapegoated
Than mortality. She runs, she pants, she Continue reading “Artemis”
The ravine is littered with fallen branches
From elm trees refusing to become corpses,
With the crumpled bark of sycamore
And the decaying cedar that crackles
Like popcorn when you put it into the fire.
Beat your chest, lover, and summon the gods
Who made you to gloat upon your power,
Your camouflaged care, your with-one-paper
Kindling responding to the placement
By intentional hands, bringing me beauty. Continue reading “What Remains”
for Mom
Stories are a part of my life because of her.
They are a part of everyone’s life but not so vividly,
Nor so intimately, as they are in my life
Because she valued story and books and poems.
We took the station wagon to the Pryor Public Library
Once a week and walked out, each of us, with a pile
Of books we could barely carry. They spread
Through our house like amoeba, like fleas, like waters
Unleashed in a basin needing to be filled. She knew
The head librarian, so we could break the rules
And check out forty books at a time, forty books
That would live in us for a week in that house
On the creek, in that place where our stories thrived. Continue reading “Where I Come From”
Sometimes you are all together.
Sometimes you are apart.
Sometimes you gather for a holiday.
Sometimes you go to work on your own.
Sometimes you eat in silence.
Sometimes your plate is full with laughter. Continue reading “Sometimes”
One day the question collides in you,
The curve of its newness slick behind
Your ear, mimicking that same arc,
Teasing you into listening, and this time,
To the way the wind whistles around
Your neck, the adjustment your feet
Make to the undulation of the earth
On this path not taken before to a place
Which tethers you without force
—Cool ageless stones lining
The threshold where you pause to drink
From a bowl of water that has appeared
To ease the burden of the new battle
Blushing its shame through your body. Continue reading “Finding the Place Where”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 