today, when the crocuses open
so yellow, so birthdayish
and so late
that I have both together this once
and in May
is remarkable
I will thread them with forget me nots
and smile for the sake of all
your other birthdays
because today is too beautiful
to remember only your absence
How does this poem
differ from thoughts and prayers
sent to people full of thoughts and prayers
so full when their mouths open
words pour out
floral and lacy as funeral cards
but minus the cash.
How does this poem
stop deaths, stop people too selfish
in their own pain from simply ending one life
and instead take 10,
20, and yesterday 17?
This poem stops nothing.
This poem changes nothing.
This poem does not celebrate life
or sanctify death.
This poem just shakes its head
as it walks out the door.
After the stones fall
we should have something here
bigger than the bones of a war
lost but still dug up
over and over, resurrecting dead
who simply want sleep
we should have a monument to loss
but it needs no flags.
it needs no glorification.
too many of our sons dead.
if there is a monument to this war
it should be gravestones
with the names worn off
it should weave through it the lives
of fatherless who raised families.
it should invoke women
who loved again
bittersweet with the tannins of old pain.
it should be perfume edged with smoke.
my hands are not strong enough to sculpt it.
Perhaps monuments of this magnitude
need to be shaped of air, posed over
empty pedestals.
****This is in no way done, but I needed to get this unformed idea out there.
I saw the presidents starched, silent and pressed in the pages
of history books though we started to call it social studies then already
maybe a little more correct politically but still skewed
to those old dead white men you gotta respect
even when your report is on Susan B Anthony.
The Cady Stanton House in Seneca Falls
on International Women’s Day
is hot and sun parched
the way central New York
sends sweat in threads
to collect where the back curves
but I don’t know heat
The heat of 25 pounds of fabric marking me
a member of the weaker sex
The food pantry is out of rice
but has plenty of boxed potatoes
leaving room for barter
a base economy
of beef stew traded for tomato soup
or egg noodles for rice
Me? I wanna be base-less
and free of cans
Rich people don’t eat canned food
and buy fresh or frozen
shop the edges of the store
while we shop the middle
a choice between hamburger helper
and ramen, hoping someday
for better meat.
They call it grief bacon
that cushion of extra tasty
layered over pain
It is not delicious?
Nothing sweeter than old tears
lacing chocolate.
I write after the children and cats are asleep
and the news slows like a clock needing winding
in an age when most time is measured digitally,
and whispered to satellites so it is always right.
I need to wait for meter, lackadaisical
and beyond this ticking down like a cooling engine
of each possible minute I might find a voice
where instead I am cutting chicken
or peeling potatoes
Its not true that all writers who are women
are childless. We are here
but guilty of living in sips and gasps
inside that room of one’s own
that is actually a linen closet
where poems whisper as we fold towels and maybe
if we are lucky enough
we remember the words
when time allows.
Susan Daniels Poetry 