Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

A Desert Tent by Mike Ferguson

Isaac
Blind
He waits for me in a desert tent
The wind with sand needles my face
I squint crows feet
I am the son
My mother wraps me in deception
My father waits in a desert tent
I smell the lie that is on me

He is old, like the womb that grew him
He is blind
He is my father
His name means laughter
I am still a clinging thing, without a wound

I carry the lie in a bowl
I feed it to my blind father
His name means laughter
The lie is heavy with spice
It is a strong lie
That my mother has prepared

Hump Day Haiku #3

Basement cold and dark

Full of fragile memories

A real treasure hunt

Cinderella's Diary by Ron Koertge

(featured in Writing the Life Poetic by Sage Cohen)

I miss my stepmother. What a thing to say
but it's true. The prince is so boring: four
hours to dress and then the cheering throngs.
Again. The page who holds the door is cute
enough to eat. Where is he once Mr. Charming
kisses my forehead goodnight?

Every morning I gaze out a casement window
at the hunters, dark men with blood on their
boots who joke and mount, their black trousers
straining, rough beards, callused hands, selfish,
abrupt...

Oh dear diary -- I am lost in ever after:
Those insufferable birds, someone in every
room with a lute, the queen calling me to look
at another painting of her son, this time
holding the transparent slipper I wish
I'd never seen.

Hump Day Haiku #2

(from Wednesday, November 17th)

Crisp blue dawn we wake

Little ones cuddle for warmth

Coffee my hero

Hump Day Haiku

Sun bleeds through foliage

Cut by window's glass, splendor

God is lonely.

ATLAS' MARKER written by Rickie Lee Jones

Maybe you want another world
One where heaven doesn't weigh so much
Maybe you'll find another girl
One you can feel when you do not touch
Well, I've got something
Warm inside me,
It won't let you
fall 'til I see
Somewhere better than this place
Somewhere better than the world
where we live...

I'm an Aviator now.
Atlas, hold me in your arms,
I'll fly...
Over this tenement waterfall,
This wet buries all the tears
we've cried.
I dream of you
coming to me
Swimming in a water
Of many hearts I've known...
Somewhere better than this place,
Beneath new stars they're calling,
Somewhere better than this place

Oh!
Don't stay at home
with your mom' in the dark
Go find the Arc -
Show them the Atlas' Marker!
You walk into school
like you've got nothing to win,
They won't let you in -
without Atlas' Marker

Oh!
my sister's buried here so deep,
I hear her
digging in her sleep
Somewhere better than this place.
Sometimes she closes her eyes
And she's far away...
Somewhere better than
the world where we live
... free