My smile is a facade
My happiness is a guise
My love is a pose
When I see lies in your eyes
What we have is myth
Honesty is deceit
All just smoke and mirrors
Treachery, defeat
Your words are empty
What you say is fiction
Excuses are fables
Causing silent tension
I am a fool
Believing you were true
When there is no truth
in what you say or do
You don’t know I see it
with my spying eyes
But I am not blind
to the lies in your eyes.
Today is my grandmother’s 90th birthday. My mother asked me to write a poem for the occasion. I had written one 10 years ago for her 80th birthday as well. In that poem I paid homage to each of her children. I decided to focus on her alone for this poem.
I recall my mother telling me once, “No one could pick cotton like Mama.” That has always stayed with me. Since she also worked in a fabric factory in the 80s, I thought a poem about cotton seemed appropriate.
I’m sorry I can’t be there today for her party, or to see her face when they read the poem to her, but I’ll be thinking about her today. And so, I wanted to share my poem with all of my readers.
90 Years of Cotton
Christmas 2009
It is 1921 when…
The first baseball game broadcasts on the radio that August
Two months later, a young man sits on his porch enjoying a cool breeze
It’d been a long hot and dusty summer that year
He looks across the barn yard and sees his two plow mules grazing
It’d been a good year for cotton.
Inside the house, a newborn baby cries
Their eighth child – another girl, another mouth to feed, to clothe
The war is over and there is little money in the bank
Lena had worked hard canning food for the winter
Otis plowed, picked and dreamed of the day he’d hold his new baby girl
Aslee, wrapped in a cotton blanket, in his arms for the first time.
Some day, she’d teach her own girls how to sew and how to pick
How to mend a button on Daddy’s cotton shirt
To patch a quilt for their new baby brother’s bed
The Deep South sun burned the back of their necks
When cotton bolls burst open with bright white
Nobody could pick cotton like their Mama.
When combine harvesters did the picking instead of people
When machines made fabric for clothes and quilts
Aslee got a job at the mill and earned a paycheck
The kids were older, Paul was gone to heaven
And picking cotton by hand was what dreams were made of
Like fluffy white clouds drifting over the barn yard of yesterday.
It is 2011 when…
Baseball games show on television, and are still broadcast on radios
Long retired, Aslee sits in her rocker under a cotton quilt and dreams,
Kept warm by her cotton pajamas and cotton lined house shoes
She remembers a day when the cotton was high and living was easy
Some ninety years ago, ninety years of cotton.
-Happy 90th Birthday, Grandma!
Love you, Shannon
© October 9th, 2011
I beat myself up on the inside because that’s where I am alone
and I don’t know how to let anyone in
It’s dark and cold, and no place for anyone else anyway
My emotions are painted red, but not like roses
My soul is blue, but not like the summer sky
I cry
Behind dry eyes because you can’t see the tears in here
Though you want to look inside
It is a lie
What you do see out there
This smile fakes what I am feeling
There are no wings to break through
Only glass rooms filled with gloom
And my heart is as heavy as a stone right now
My brain is an anchor
and I am drowning in a sea of sorrow
I cut myself, carving empty words on these walls
But it’s too dark to read
Too dark to see the sun on the outside
The outside
where you are waiting for me
to break free
But only I can tear down these walls
These walls that keep me inside
Inside
where I beat myself up
Baked cookies with Sylvia Plath
Got lost in the woods with Frost
Sat with Conrad Aiken riverside
Blake told me how the rose died
Open your door Emily Dickinson
Let the Wilde nights in
T.S. Eliot has a name for your cat
A whipporwill feather for Shakespeare’s hat
Keats sang of the nightingale, Cummings
Anyone lived in a pretty how town
Arcadian Winters Willa Cather wrote down
James Joyce said a prayer
C. S. Lewis was there
because After Prayers, Lie Cold
Silverstein riddled about the old
man and the little boy
Coventry Patmore gave him a toy
but Death sets a thing significant, Emily
Did Tessimond betray us?
Just ask Robert Browning’s bust.
From Tale of a Tub…
each day demands we create our whole world over,
disguising the constant horror in a coat
of many-colored fictions; we mask our past
in the green of eden, pretend future’s shining fruit
can sprout from the navel of this present waste.
–Sylvia Plath
The bright wire rolls like a porpoise
in and out of the calm blue sea
of the cover, or perhaps like a sleeper
twisting in and out of his dreams
for it could hold a record of dreams
if you wanted to buy it for that,
though it seems to be meant for
more serious work, with its
college-ruled lines and its cover
that states in emphatic white letters
5 SUBJECT NOTEBOOK. It seems
a part of growing old is no longer
to have five subjects, each
demanding an equal share of attention,
set apart by brown cardboard dividers,
but instead to stand in a drugstore
and hang on to one subject
a little too long, like this notebook
you weigh in your hands, passing
your fingers over its surfaces
as if it were some kind of wonder.
It snowed again here yesterday, a nice brief bit of snow flurries, just enough to cover the ground. I like it when it’s just a nice gentle snow, not any ice or other bad weather.
Very pretty for New Years Day so I decided to write a poem about it…
A view of the snow from the back yard.
Frosty white flies flicker down
covering the ground
like puzzle pieces
each is
different
but from the same
Place above in the sky
flying down from so high
covering the night
in a blanket of white
We pull our blankets
around us tighter
To keep warm
while the winter storm
falls peacefully outside
Clocks start over again
wishing a new day in
and a new year
with a white winter here
What is the season
that falls between summer and fall
where August changes cause
the kids went back to school
there’s no one to play games
on the fading green grass
empty pool water idly licks the tiled sides
where boys of summer once bathed in the sun
the sun is lonely now
the temperature drops
the harvest moon rises
katydids sing longer songs
and birds fluff their feathers to ward
off the sixty degree chill
but the trees
still have their leaves
and their leaves are green
the grass is not dead
just empty
the only pumpkins I see
are plastic and lining shop shelves
to remind us
that harvest
will be here soon
and County fair ribbons will be won
and kids go to football games for fun
and say trick-or-treat
with candy corn to eat
while witches fly and
apples bob in water
But it’s barely September
and I can’t remember
what season it is
when it’s too cool for summer
but too hot for fall
somewhere in the middle
caught up in it all
when the flowers stop growing
and lawn boys aren’t mowing
down the last of the dandelions
and grass
Mother nature
your slip is showing.
The reason
what is this season?
Purple candle flickers on a wall
separating two lovers
who face each other
but cannot see
through the internet screens
through the music in the air
through the walls that separate them
but each knows
what the other looks like
inside and out
without having to see
through the walls
where
the purple candle flickers.
I Know Her
48 East Main
There’s a place I know
Where I once lived
And still occasionally go
Back to my hometown
Where the leaves and neighbors change
Faces I don’t know
Nothing stays the same
But I find her there waiting
With arms open wide
I see her kind face
And it fills me with pride
I know her gentle love
And it comforts me so
I feel her warm embrace
Sometimes I don’t want to let go
This house, this woman
My hearts knows no other
Because it wouldn’t be home
Without my dear mother.
