November 18.21: Coping

I’m lonely;

I’ll make me a world,

God said.

Now comes the echo,

in winter wind

— loneliest sound —

that lifts dead leaves

like empty chalices,

a last offering

before ice that freezes

even loneliness,

and the moldering carpet

woven by the wind

becomes blanket

for wiggly unseens.

And yet

I’m lonely

lingers:

each of us,

after all,

only one.

 

With thanks to James Weldon Johnson for his poem “The Creation,”

and to the anonymous student

in a high school speech meet many years ago

who put it in my head.

 

June 18.20: Coping

I see many references to isolation and aloneness these days. As an introvert, I’m comfortable with aloneness. Usually content with my own company, I do not crave the madding crowd. Aloneness isn’t always loneliness.

But I haven’t been with my family since March 6. No hugs for three months! There’s loneliness in that, as many elderly (and not-so-elderly) know.

It has recently occurred to me that there is another dimension to my aloneness. My close friends vary in age, but all of us have experienced family death in our parents’ generation. However, among my friends, I am the only one to have lost the sibling connection to the past; I’m the first to be The Last. This hit me as a revelation. Unaware, I’ve been grappling with a sense of aloneness among my friends.

I am an old single parent who is also The Last One of the family she grew up with — those are my particular circumstances — but I think most of us are grappling with some kind of aloneness, and maybe loneliness too, at this time. It doesn’t mean we have the same life experiences, only that we are in the same human condition. Human, but dangerously corrosive, all the more so swirled as it is with anger.

As I’ve said before, I think writers write about two things: what is, and what could be. Sometimes we can’t write about what could be until we write about what is. For me, this is what is.

 

 

September 11.19

Death sets a table

for Loneliness,

snuffs the light of expecting,

feasts on emptiness.

And yet

the planting

defiant

makes the earth take seed.

We must think of both.

 

9/11

With more thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

 

 

Connections: March 11.18

I hold these geese

in low esteem

this has become

my  rabid meme.

And so it is

with disbelief

I ask is this

a goose in grief.

In seeming search

unanswered blat

it seems to wander

aimless, flat.

It’s obvious

my mind is crumbling

imagination stretched

brain all bumbling.

A writer’s mind

obliterated

sees the world

hallucinated.

How else to render

explanation

for my deluded

ratiocination?

Perhaps his lady

is just egg-sitting

and he is nervous

tense, unwitting.

But whether Dame

or anxious Sire

the ducks are going

to inquire.

I needn’t worry

until I see

my back yard’s become

the nursery.

Connections

 

Connections: December 20.16

Cold is a lonely thing

a childless park

a street frozen-rutted

silent, stark.

Hard world

for tiny chickadee

hopping zig-zags

in empty tree

twig to twig

at life’s behest

lone Galahad

in Grail’s quest.

Connections