One Poem. One Planet. April 1, 2017

April is National Poetry Month in this particular spot on the planet. This year, to celebrate, I’m embarking on a journey of my own writing and poeming and wondering. My goal this year is to write a month long cycle of poems, one leading into the next.

No destination in mind.

Nothing earth-shattering.

No isms.

My goal is simply to keep setting out each day for a month of witnessing life on this planet as I know it. A poem a day for the sheer joy of writing a poem a day. You’re welcome to read and comment, and perhaps you’ll join in with your own poem about your spot on this big blue complex marble.

So here it is, the first offering, a love poem to get us rolling:

 

1.
It’s spring again,
our time to comb the entirety
of earth’s green memory
for our first touch, the unfolding bud
of infatuation splitting the smooth bark
of our selves

look closer at the shape of my eye
the blue pathway surrounding
the dark well where you used to draw
the water of me
up and out

how weightless you were
that first time you pitched forward
tumbling through the red cave of my ear
the echo of your voice
marking the depths as you fell,
so many times you called my name
until it grew wings
and wings and wings
and flared and flew
up to the rafters and no coaxing
would bring it back down

Maybe that’s why I leave the window open
at night, or why you always close it
when you come to bed, and why I rise in the dark
to open it again after you’ve fallen asleep

 

 

 Tomorrow’s poem

#onepoemoneplanet

← A YEAR IN YOGA PANTS

One Poem. One Planet. April 2, 2017 →

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47 Crowhops Around the Sun… this is my most loved quilt. I made this for my husbands birthday almost 20 years ago. Every row around the sun is a different fabric, representing each year of his life. The red square represents the day we met. And the label on the back has a black x on the middle finger because I had actually broken the tip of that finger in a door halfway through sewing this and had to finish with a splint on my finger. While I was able to still sew, I remember I couldn’t write and had to train myself to write with my other hand. Not pretty.

I think what I love about quilting is that there are so many different steps and skills required at each stage of the process. I don’t have a favorite step because I enjoy them all, from designing to binding. Some quilts start in dreams, and I go straight to cutting and sewing fabric, never knowing what the exact outcome will be. Other quilts begin as doodles before they find their way into my gridded notebook and I have to drag out ALL the colored pencils. I’m working on this year’s Pride Quilt and I’m loving it so far. Next step is to put it through my erroneous and downright hilarious quilt math calculations which mean the quilt will mostly look like what I planned but somewhere in the making will take on a life of its own. I can’t wait to start sewing on this one.

Today was a sketchbook day.

And there it is, and on the bottom shelf it shall remain, the Deep Bucket of What Was I Thinking? I don’t even know what’s in here anymore but I’m committing now to repurpose at least one thing out of this bucket this year. Yowza.

As a writer, I learned the importance of a good eraser. As a quilter, I’ve learned the same lesson. My favorite tool is my eraser. Some call it a seam ripper, but for me, it’s an eraser. In my hand, it becomes the guardian spirit of the re-do. We all need that from time to time, don’t we?