The new dVerse Anthology is here!

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Frank Watson has done it again–the new dVerse Anthology is out, and one of my poems is in it.  Don’t buy it for that, though.  There are LOADS of wonderful poems written by amazing poets in here.  I have to say I am thrilled to be included, though!

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , | 20 Comments

The Look

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

John, one of my favorites of his, says something here so strongly, so simply.

J. Alex Pan's avatarA Prayer Like Gravity

Do you look 
		beautiful, 

Do you look 
		beautifully,
                    or

Do you look 
		beauty 
			  fully
in the face
		and tell 
			  it to 
		fuck 
                         right 
                                  off?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My beautiful wife hates
to have her picture taken.

What have you done
to my love?

My little girl wants to 
be a ballerina, a fairy.

What will you do
to love?

So many girls
becoming 
so many women.

What do you do
to love?

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Posted in New Free Verse | 4 Comments

Unplugged, no signal, the place I step off the grid and into this other web that holds me when I remember and when I forget.

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

I walk in green; fern-scented, loam deep, where footprints spell names:  Deer, fox, coyote, heron, woman.

There is a grail some call holy I am hunting.  A poetry that speaks one word, sparer than pig and i spring rain, but an exhalation that shouts all things–the name of God, the I AM stretched in strings under everything that is.

Maybe a hunt for words is useless and we should seek and speak silence–the perfect poem spun by the genius of wind in the leaves, the purpose of stone.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , , , , | 50 Comments

on finding a fragment of a cross in Turkey

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Show me wood
and I will say
there were 10,000 crosses

but my belief
is not bound up in trees

I am old as shale
layered under my feet
and young as air

what I know hums
in molecules I borrow
and give back

simple as breath.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , | 58 Comments

Let’s suspend disbelief

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Let’s suspend disbelief,
hang it like a moon-shaped charm
on a bracelet, ballast for a wrist ’70s style;

silver poodles, stretched glass cats,
beaded birthstones and initials
linked and rattling unlikely music.

***we are trying our hands at Twitter poetry today at dVerse.
Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , | 50 Comments

peacock

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Shake your feathers at me
and I will want those hundred eyes
turned only towards me,
because we are such greedy things,
squabbling for the prettiest mate
and ripest fruit.

Shake your feathers at me
and I will wink back at all your eyes,
because you can’t fit on the list of things I have had,
things I know, things I call mine; trinkets
filling my pockets and forgotten.

This is how I will love you–without hands,
breathed in, moved through; as impossible to hide
or contain as sunlight.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , , , , | 68 Comments

the creek bank

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

The men pull steelhead
from this water, long as my arm
and I wonder where they find them
in all this shallowness.

I fished, once, licensed
and ankle deep
in morning on the edge
of Rainbow Lake,
hooking one small trout
I fought only to throw back,
so that once didn’t give me
a white whale metonym
to throw rage after
or call brother, even.

My fish stories
are minnow small
and flashed, fast
as the odonata skimming the still spots
of this creek

catching nothing
except peace

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , , , | 53 Comments