One Single Impression: Listening

One Single Impression's prompt this week was "listening." It's always hard for me not to apologize for what I post here. Fresh out of the pen/computer poems make me feel very vulnerable. I've gotten addicted to adding graphics, probably partly because it's fun and probably partly because I hope that if it looks more interesting people won't notice my failings quite so much. Listening for some reason didn't offer a lot of visual inspiration for me and what it did seemed to need to be muted. But anyway, here's what I came up with. Reading one another's poems - reading someone's blog - is a form of listening, so I thank you for visiting, for reading, commenting, listening.

If you click on the graphic items, you can see them larger and hopefully they will be more readable. Alas, this week the type may be both too small and too large...

To those who know how

Listening seems such a small thing

Oh how wrong they are

It’s a gift beyond measure

When a lonely heart feels heard

You can click on this to see the text larger.

Listening to your voice

Still in my head, Mother dear

I am lost, confused

I want to put you to rest

Listen to better angels

One Single Impression: Smoke

(Please scroll down for Shadow Shot Sunday.)

It has been FOREVER since I managed to squeeze anything out of my brain for One Single Impression and I have really missed both writing and reading. This week's prompt was "smoke." I kind of hate what I've got... but I really want to join in again even if I suck...


A small (belated) disclaimer about the cigarette poem in response to a few comments. I don't blame smokers for smoking. I hate that there is an addictive product out there being marketed to them. I have friends trying to quit and having a hard time. It bugs me that people are getting rich causing harm to others. Anyway, this isn't an anti SMOKER poem, it's an anti smoking poem.

One Single Impression: Two Prompts - Welcoming and Childhood Memories

(Please scroll down for the final Gratitude post.)


This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "welcoming." I missed last week even though I really wanted to participate so I have added a response to that prompt at the bottom of this post. I warn you in advance that it is very long and gloomy. Sorry about that.

Welcoming each day

My gratitude unbounded

How awesome is life

~~~~~~~~~~~

I have slowly learned

To welcome all life offers

Not always with grace

But with a desire to trust

To find beauty in all things

~~~~~~~~~~~

This poem for last week's prompt is VERY, VERY long. I just wrote it. I have not polished it. It took two weeks and a half dozen false starts to get anything, yet I wanted very much to respond to that prompt.... so I did, just a week late. My apologies for the length and the.... darkness of it. This is what I come up with after a month of writing about gratitude. What's wrong with this picture?

Childhood memories are rare and full of pain

Part of me thinks still that I had a happy childhood

I was more fortunate than many, I know that

I had a home, a family – crazy as they were –

I had food to eat, ideas and books

I wasn’t Unloved

Just badly loved

Not out of malice or malevolence

But my parent’s own woundedness

They meant no harm

I believe that

My brother, I think, did

He loved me and hated me both

I don’t know why

Some mis-firing synapses in his brain, no doubt

Doesn’t really matter any more

Though his cruelty, his madness

Has etched itself into my bones

Scarring them with the acid of his devious hate

Sometimes he was mean, you see

But often, his malice was coated with sugar

Always it was excused, explained away

By a mother who thought she could pretend it into submission

Then there were my two fathers

The elegant, brilliant actuary and the slobbering fool

Oddly, it was the drunk Dad who I knew best

I was his caretaker

We made music together Drunk Dad and I

Those close moments at the piano

Him lurching

Tuning and retuning his mandolin

Sitting too close on the bench

Breath strange, eyes red and glazed

Those are my “happy” memories

I didn’t understand until years later

Until my 40s

How afraid I was

Didn’t understand that life on watch

Is not normal

I remember watching him make drinks

(I was server)

Chugging shots as he did

Drunk before he had his first official sip

I remember watching him at dinner

Stuporous

Take all the food onto his plate

Before my turn

My mother’s anger simmering

I remember once my mother packing all her things

“I’m leaving,” she said

But she didn’t mention me.

What about me?
I remember that as being on my birthday

Though I doubt it was

Just my psyche’s code

You are to blame

They would have been ok without you

Be good

Be very good

You must atone for existing

Oddly, aware as I was of my father drinking

Of how he got so drunk

The power of denial is so strong

It took my sister’s anger one day

“You’re drunk” she yelled

I was in my 20s.

“Aha!” my brain cried at last.

“That explains it.”

It’s not that there were no happy days

I think there were.

But I think I wasn’t there

I lived my childhood

Both hyper-vigilant and out of body

It’s how I survived

I still feel guilty

Saying all this

(And there’s so much more)

My parents were good people

How can I betray them so?
They did their best

I have no right to blame them

To be sad or hurt or lost

Even now

I don’t know what’s the truth

Was I a lucky child?
My mother said I was

And ungrateful too

Certainly compared to her

I had a golden childhood

She reminded me of that constantly

As she spilled her own grief into my child heart

I listened to her story

And felt it as my own

In therapy years later,

I realized that her memories were so vivid in me

It was like they were my own.

They are terrible memories

Brutal and harsh

My life was so much better

How can I complain?

I don’t complain really

I try not to

The bad came with much good as well

And in the end I am who I am

Because of both

My weaknesses and strengths

Emotional Siamese twins

Operating for good and ill from the same source

This is long

Unpolished

I do not speak easily of the child I was

She is lost to me and she rules me both

I am still trying to make peace with her

With them

With pain

With shame

With love and loss and confusion

So tangled together

That at 60 years I still can’t sort them out

I don’t know why I remember the bad

More than the good

I am ashamed of that

But it’s how it is.

One Single Impression: Disguise

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "disguise." For some reason except for the last one, this week's poems are kind of dark. The first three come from the days of my youth. Don't think I have every published any of them before and I probably should have left it that way, but.... for better or worse, I'm going to share them. Guess that's it by way of apologies. Can't help myself.

Calico Madness

This week's One Single Impression prompt was "serendipity," and I haven't yet come up with any inspiration for it but it did make me think of another kind of coincidence, I wasn't fast enough with my camera to get a really good shot so this is a composite of two not so good ones pasted together. Still, to those of you who doubt my stories about Angel's gift for trouble.... I will just say that this was probably her most minor accomplishment among dozens this week. She has been on an Act Out For October Spree. Anybody want a sweet little calico cat?

One Single Impression

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "autumn." I would have thought this would be an easy one but my muse seems to be in early hibernation. This is all I could come up with.

One Single Impression: Defenses Down

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "defenses down." The little haiku about opening my heart came pretty quickly, but after that it was a struggle. I keep thinking I should have a lot to say about this but my brain doesn't want to offer up anything. The last one - which I just wrote this minute (as opposed to last night), might have potential but it isn't very good at the moment. I'm posting it anyway. Desperation, I guess.



Turn the other cheek
Means let your defenses down
And give peace a chance
How else is there any hope
Of ending foolish wars

Peace is what we crave
It is our natural impulse
It’s where the heart is
Until those with agendas
Trick us into shedding blood

After 9/11
There was a moment, a chance
An instant in time
When people across the globe
Reached out to hug, not to strike

After 9/11
The world was betrayed again
By mongers of fear
Using words like God and freedom
To excuse betraying both


***********


My defenses down
I open my heart to you
Trusting and afraid


***********

I went to a workshop once
And as often happens
I felt very alone
Needy
Ugly
Out of place
I was with a friend
Everyone loved her
Which made it even worse
I feel so undefended out in the world
Like a child looking for a mother
Lost
Afraid
Alone
Even in a crowd
It was a healer's gathering
Later we all took turns
Lying on the table
Opening ourselves to love
The woman who led the group
Working on me
Said
"Wow!
I'm amazed at how huge your heart is.
You seemed so closed and defended."
Ironic, isn't it?
I thought I had my defenses down
That I had none
But the world saw me armed to the teeth
If only we could learn
That fear and shame and doubt
Are defenses that close us off from what we want
And if only we could learn
To look past what people (nations) seem to be
And look into their hearts
I bet we'd be surprised
At how beautiful they really are
Wow, we'd say
Hearing your leaders
(the face nations show the world)
I thought you cold and cruel
But now I see your heart
And oh, how big it is!
Just like mine.

One Single Impression: Spectacle

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "spectacle." I thought this was the prompt three weeks ago, so I've had these waiting to post. (If you have trouble reading any of these, you can click on them to see a larger verison.)

Not spectacular
But already completed
Easy week for me

One Single Impression: Resolve

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "resolve." Squeezing even these three pathetic offerings out was not easy. Sigh.

Although I resolved
To participate today
No inspiration
Alas, ideas were too few
Inspiration came not

Where are our leaders?
Why won’t they do anything?
Eight years of unchecked
High crimes and misdemeanors
Where is Congress’s resolve?

~~~~~~~~~~~

Somehow firm resolve
Doesn’t always linger on
I start strong and fade

~~~~~~~~~~~

Resolve’s a good thing
A long as we remember
You can’t always win
Sometimes God has other plans
That are more long range than ours

Poem(s) of the Week: Two Dark Poems, Two about Time

From right to left: My sister Carole in pink, my brother Phil and me.
This is the only picture of my brother that I have available digitally. I may try to photograph some other, later pictures tomorrow but I'll have to dig them out of storage. Except that we are rather rosy cheeked and painted in the style of antiquity, it's a nice picture. You could look at it and think we lived a different life than we did. Doesn't really go with the poems, but it's what I wanted to post.

This an odd collection of poems. The first two are about my relationship with my brother. It took me until my 40s to realize how destructive he was. I lived most of my life before then in a kind of trance in which my job was to make everyone happy and anything which went wrong in the world was my fault. It took me about 8 years of therapy to start being pissed off. I'm stubborn. The last two poems are just kind of odd. Not sure why I'm posting them at all. Maybe because they are less dark than the first two. The first two were written probably when I was in my 50s, the second two in my 20s or 30s. Anyway, proceed at your own risk.

THINKING ABOUT MY BROTHER

When I think of seeing him
I see a giant spider
Waiting to mummify me
In gooey silken thread
Before it makes a meal of me
Slowly over time
Keeping me alive somehow
Until it can suck not just the life
But the spirit out of me
Can I have loved him once?
Was there someone once to love
Despite the rages and hurts
And did the darkness grow and grow inside him
Until there was nothing else left?

- Katherine E. Rabenau

If I let my rage come loose
Will the sharp-edged, iron weight
Fly wild and hurt some stranger
Or will it cut straight through you, dear brother
And kill Mom too?
Do I shield you because
To touch my rage at you
Is to risk hurting her
Whom I loved so much
Who hurt me so?

- Katherine E. Rabenau

TIME CHANGES EVERYTHING

Time changes everything
Locks us in words, threadbare maxims
Plays sleight of hand with hope
(Now you see it, now you don't)
But never pauses the slow march
Sideways through eternity
Never stops holding out the bait
While mankind pursues the hand on the clock
Endlessly circling
Until he stops to be rewound
And set on the same foolish chase

- Katherine E. Rabenau

UNTITLED

A sequence of events
Ordained by fate and chance alike
Determines
Borders of the possible
An infinite set of variable mandates
By which we steer our lives
Into some mysterious triangle
Where all things make sense
And the world no longer sees or hears
But none-the-less wonders from time to time
What it all meant
And what that power is
Whose presence we cannot know.

- Katherine E. Rabenau

Poem(s) of the Week: Five Short Poems

Just five very short, unrelated poems this week.

So much sound
Without meaning
So much meaning
Without sound
Tangled in words
Thoughts are lost
Or else, wordless,
Pass unheard

FRAGMENT

Daughter of my soul
I cry for you in the long dark night
Ache with an incompleteness
That takes not from the joy of life
But yearns for more

Seeker after blind dreams
And happy unrealities
Dreamer of dark scenes
In love with the shadows
My mind casts against reality
I cling for a few desperate moments
To you.

Remembering childhood days in the park
I wish sometimes
To have those moments back
Of trust
And smiling eyes
And no conscience

THUNDER SHOWERS

After singing sweet songs
Angels clear their throats
And weep a bit
Upon the tone-deaf world

- Katherine E. Rabenau

One Single Impression: Folly

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "folly." Not a lot of inspiration today, just these three, the third one added late. None of them thrills me, I'm afraid.

One Single Impression: Faces

This week's prompt for One Single Impression was "faces." A hodge-podge today. Eight haiku, two tankas (my first ever). . . and an old poem that I posted back in April. I tried to make a nice collage of faces - and I did - but then I was worried that I didn't have people's permission to show their wonderfulness and I couldn't figure out a way to disguise them without making it just ugly, so... no decoration today, just words... except for Memling, down at the bottom.

How did I not see
The ugliness in your face
When I still loved you

~~~

How did I not see
The sweet kindness of your face
Until I knew you

~~~

Faceless in the grave
I wonder what your life was
Centuries ago

~~~

Why won’t you face me
Why not say what it’s about
So I can have peace

~~~

Faceless demons taunt
Their hateful words spewed at me
From inside my mind

~~~

My sister’s children
In your faces I see hers
And know she lives on

~~~

It’s not the features
That make a face beautiful
It’s the soul inside

~~~

I want to make peace
With the face in my mirror
Why does she mock me?

~~~

Face it, he intoned
You'll never amount to much
Like he'd cast a spell
I believed that lie for years
Until one day I woke up

~~~

Just seeing your face
Tells me miracles are real
I'm not your mother
But I love you like I was
Deep inside my cells and bones


I'm going to add one more. I've posted this before - back in April - but it is truly about a face, so I thought I'd share it again here, with the accompanying art that inspired it. If you are interested in the story behind it, you can check back here.


MEMLING'S PORTRAIT OF A MAN

I see your face
Staring across centuries of canvas
And I am drawn through time by your magnetism
I know I loved you once, or would have,
You look so much a part of me
With that quiet fanaticism
Maybe we were lovers in another incarnation
And it was so fine that neither of us has forgotten
In the five hundred years since you were you
And I, whoever I was then.