Five Poems/Five Days

Peace“Peace” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I’ve been writing each morning this week over at Ethical ELA with its monthly OpenWrite, which is five days of poetry prompts. I appreciate the community of writers there, and the generous spirit that unfolds in the writing shared, and comments, made.

Here are my five poems from the past five days, with the one-word themes in bold as the titles:

Thanks

The shelves have become
barren of those silly cards,
those throw-away phrases
that always tried so hard
to make us laugh, in aisles
of the grocery store and
boutique shops and kiosks
in the mall, manufactured thanks
spit out by cold machines,
while I’m still one of those few
who settles down in the quiet,
pen in hand, to carve out poems
from the bones of memory,
a crinkled paper-cut of words
tucked into the folds
of your jacket pocket

Giving

What is
hope

but a rope
for which
to climb

a chance
to take
our time

a moment
in which
we find

something within us
that brings us
together

Receiving

There was a time
when the crowd hushed,
when all of our eyes watched
the ball flung into motion

with such beautiful flight,
its shape slightly wobbled
in the air flow imbalance
of impossibility

It’s that breath before
that I remember the most,
the beauty of the possibility
of perfect reception,

and not the drop,
when the world stopped,
and the magic
of the moment, broken
open

Breath

Awake,
when sleep
departs,
listening
to rhythms
of night,
the landscape
inscrutable
but for some
small melody
still yet lingering:
mere gossamer
and translucence
and then gone

Heal

Scars
show healing,
too, knife lines
tracing wounded
worlds, places
of exposure
in which fingers
brush up against
the past, the skin
always sharing stories,
with jagged
imperfections
etched deep
inside the heart

Peace (sharing it forward),
Kevin

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