the last time

I wrote this in January of 2008 in response to a writing prompt: "When did you last stay up all night?" For some reason it resonated for me this evening as I ran across it accidentally in some old files.

It was last season, before all the leaves fell. I sat by a fire and renewed it when it diminished and read poems and wrote some things down in my notebook. I listened to the quiet. I held my old gray cat against my bare knee and rubbed his head. I thought about my grandmother and her painting and how she didn't start doing it till she was over fifty. I took some pictures of small things: a silver pendant, an old acorn I found under a tree in New England, the plumes of color coming off the burning wood in front of me. I didn't even try to sleep. I walked out onto the deck around 3 a.m. and the wind was blowing leaves down in big drifts. I made myself some popcorn and dusted some brewer's yeast onto it. I felt happy in my solitude though also a little lonely. I find that when my singularity is challenged I cling most intensely to these times. It’s good to stay up all night alone from time to time.

This

This flame, this ribbon, this branch, this windblown cloudbank covering up the sun.
This song, this crevice, this hammer, this net,
this scrap of orange fabric in the grass.
This pause, this shoelace, this errant ladybug with distended wings crawling across the soft gray crawlspace of my pillow.
This hymn, this bird, this bit of news I wish I hadn't overheard but did.
This wasp fallen into wine.
This lost sentence of love trembling with need,
this half-acre of of sawdust and clay,
this trembling oak leaf suspended by nothing visible from a tender twig in the small gray rain.
This crow, this dog, this laughing coyote, this shed skin that wants to find itself a home in dirt.
This choir stall, this stairwell, this echo of an antiphon in darkness.
This shoe, this hearth, this rock, this bell,
this dazzle of lonesome verbiage truncated into a punctuation full of fire and the scent of piney heartwood as it catches.
This pen, this slip of paper made from sand and bloodroot, wanting nothing but the touch of a thought too small to shout, too big to whisper, too unrepentant to have it out with God,
too shy and wild to say its name in any place where anyone might hear.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

This is another poem from Thanksgiving week of this year, when I was on retreat at Gethsemani.

Your quiet nowhere
storms my emptied
world like a hawk,
a helpless lover
shining and nameless
in the tender
solitude of
this forest's night.
No other
moment has
this face's heart;
no other
fire loves what
it burns so
sweetly.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

vocabulary

When the living syllables
of sky and forest
shine through the silent shapes
of sweetgum and red oak,
I search among their scraps for
the powerful, lonely
somewhere of you.
Infinite and wordless,
you hunt my solitude down
and fill its hours with
the vocabulary of daybreak
and campfire, the poetry
of forgiveness vivid
in the roots of
your dancing, passionate
question.

©Laura Sorrells
all rights reserved

This is a found poem I wrote today using words from  the children's book A Crow Doesn't Need a Shadow: a Guide to Writing Poetry from Nature by Lorraine Ferra and a whole bunch of very poetic children.

Newborn

It’s haphazard and I don’t like it, this way I have, when I’m living alone, of collapsing into self-neglect when it comes to how and what I eat. I know better. Rice cakes broken in half like sacramental wafers and nibbled as I sweep or read. Peanut butter slathered loosely on heels of whole wheat loaf bread. I’m not down to Sunbeam yet but maybe getting there. Lots of coffee. The French press is working overtime. I unwittingly bought a pound of decaf Sumatra the other day and buzzed around organizing my shelves and folding clothes until I happened to notice there was nothing behind the imagined push I felt from the beans. Diet soda, once my sworn enemy, crowds my refrigerator shelves in half-full bottles that I’ll empty and recycle soon. Some days I don’t eat till evening, eschewing the corn dogs and cardboard pizza triangles the school cafeteria offers. Other days I go ahead and dance with the devil and I always regret it: flavorless chicken sandwiches that would make Thich Naht Hanh shudder and throw up his patient hands, wilted huddles of what passes for salad, and the inevitable applesauce. Nowadays I don’t even boil water for oatmeal, much less sit down at my dining room table to eat it slow with raisins and honey like I used to. I deserve some homemade guacamole, an organic spinach salad nurtured with the sweetest flakes of carrot you can think of, and fresh crusty French bread dipped in EVOO. I need some green tea, the kind flavored with rose petals, or maybe some pomegranate juice, pure and expensive. Bring me something clean and wild, something delicate, something strong. Hurry it onto the plate, into my glass, and sit me down in front of it. light me a candle and tell me something about the sky. Hold my hand and break bread with me, and slow me down when I chew too fast. Remind me to hear the way I taste my food and to smell the colors as if they were newborn: fragile, wet, and hooked by the miracle of how to swallow.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved