Category Archives: poetry

Three Poems

01 Friday Jan 2016

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Walking with Benen

He is telling you about the turtles, how there were seven of them, no, actually seven frogs, but lots of turtles too, and a large snapping turtle who was this big, and they caught them and held them, but no, they didn’t keep them, they put them back in the water and none of them were hurt and they were really happy, the frogs and the turtles, of which there were many, tons of them, and the urgent joy in his eyes and his motioning hands and the little skipping walk, as if forward is not enough motion but up and down too, and his hoarse bright voice rising, rising above even the generations-old trees with their low swooshing of leaves, because the turtles and frogs, with their legs and beaks and beady eyes, are the whole world, and you want to take this world and tuck it in your pocket and carry it always, like a bright jewel or a stone smoothed by many waters.

(first published in The Lake http://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/poetry-archive/nov15a/)

 

What a Poem Is

Both wound and consolation
the wound being truth
the consolation also.
Not truth as a scalpel
cold, precise
but more as a silken net cast wide over the world
and gathered back full
of living things.

Worded desire
or a loss unfurled like a towel shaken out
before you lay it to rest on the sand.

The rope thrown over the edge of the cliff
and the someone on the other end
to pull you up.

The pluck that sets you thrumming.

Little torn off corners of eternity you can stuff
in your pocket.

The old man inching his way through the evening air,
the metallic plink of his walker marking his steady progress.

(first published in The Lake http://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/poetry-archive/nov15a/)

 

The Headline Reads Processed Meat Causes Cancer, Says WHO

and again I hear my mother’s voice, Says who?
challenging some claim asserted
by an expert on the radio or the President
in his State of the Union address—Says who?
she would throw back, wearing her flowered apron,
her arms akimbo, the roll in her eye visible
even when we couldn’t see her face.
No authority save God was safe from her
Says who?

Says the World Health Organization, Mom, that’s WHO,
I’d tell her if I could.  If she hadn’t died fourteen years ago
of a cancer no one had heard of, not even the specialists,
even though she disdained processed meat and ate more fruits
and vegetables than anyone I know.  Because whatever we eat
or drink or smoke or think, we’re all going to die someday.
Says who? A little patch of green under an arching tree,
the bronze letters on a plaque spotted with rain.

(first published in Rattle  http://www.rattle.com/poetry/the-headline-reads-processed-meat-causes-cancer-says-who-by-katherine-lo/)

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The Days Between (Advent 2015)

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in musings, poetry

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The one who is in love
waiting for a phone call from the beloved.
The one who interviewed
waiting for an offer.
The sick and suffering
waiting to recover.
The prisoner
waiting to be freed.
All in the expectation that
something is coming, its arrival
an inevitable conclusion.
Unless it doesn’t.

And the certainty that it will come
becomes maybe it will come, as in
when God is less busy with other customers.
Except that it doesn’t, so maybe it will come becomes
it probably won’t happen
because you don’t want to expect too much
and maybe God will finally glance
your way when you stop tapping his shoulder
and go sit in the corner instead. Except that
he doesn’t, and it probably won’t happen
becomes silence. His and now yours.

To wait for something that won’t ever arrive
is the soul stretched on the rack
ever tightening until something tears.
A friend tells you all prayers are answered in the resurrection,
both beautiful and unbearable under the weight
of all the long hours of all the long days stretching before you.

So you go to the stories living on tissue-thin pages
and mouth the ancient names. Abraham, Sarah, Joseph
waited lifetimes in the space between
chapters that speed us all too quickly toward
a resolution they dragged their way to.
The stories don’t us tell what they thought
during all those days in between, what they cried out,
though our own mouths do, our own thoughts,
the longings we have learned to bury deep
like the thirsty roots of a tree in dry land, not knowing
when the storm clouds gathering will release
all their darkness into quenching rain.

One Week After Resurrection Sunday

12 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by in poetry

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The rose bushes are in full bloom
in a frilly abundance that would border on shameless if they weren’t
so beautiful.  If they weren’t so perfectly crafted to make
you sigh, like the bee so drunk with nectar he can’t even fly
straight, but does a kind of airborne stagger.

It will not last, of course.  Tiny stick bugs already cling
to the pale undersides of petals, their microscopic jaws working.
The summer sun will scorch the edges black, and fall
will rust the leaves, the months diminishing
each bush until the day I cut them all down,
stripping away the few rain-soaked buds that lack
the strength to open.

My father, whose body is becoming a stiffening husk
that other hands now bathe and dress,
tells me how at his college in Taiwan the students would gather
in the courtyard every Friday night to play records
borrowed from the American Embassy.

They would set up the record player and the oversized speakers.
They would hand out programs and play Beethoven,
Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Bach,
all of them perched in silence, their heads tilted with listening.

After the cutting down, Lord, this is what I imagine,
the mercy hoped for in the blade—
my father once again that rapt young man,
every nerve and cell alive and singing.