Daisies

Ring around the roses
but you pick daisies

not in season, these flowers
that are a wild spring breathing

daisies, daisies
denting on your window

this is age, you sleep
with the daisies looking after you

breathing.

To ease death we say

to ease death we say, all sorts of things
valid or just left there in the space that has been opened

to ease death we say
the baby was incomplete

the heart couldn't function anymore
fractured around its edges

to ease death we say
it was a disappearance

journey completed
from the East to the West

to ease death we say
the loved ones are gathered

somewhere that's boundless
maybe this is how the verbs break in on us

to ease death
regardless of what we say

waiting in a vacant time, lets us expand
into easier versions of the same death.

Grandpa on the chair

Like a guard lion I sit
near the window that looks out
you sit before me on the street
holding all the dignity in the crook of your arms

little fingers over the pedals and you roll
into the direction that goes outward
there are chairs that have been made for us
to wear them even if they fall upon us

but he was steady, the mark of youth
sitting directly like a carried gift
a boy in your lap, yellow haired
smiling as you carried him

like a vessel sailing toward the sea
you move swiftly enchantment
against a wind that rejects your bones
this is the love of a grandparent, it lifts outside of the waves.

Rethinking heritage

A vision of my grandmother, with glasses on
strands of yarn in her fingers making jackets
to restrain warmth in my chest
this is heritage,
the way love is weaved for us to hold in our hands.

Thobe

Left in the closet,
hanging between my grandmother's tale and my rush to greet other faces
is my Thobe, a dress hand-stitched, with loss and love.

green hand

once spring made the trees glitter green
at your touch, you said, a green hand makes the soil grow
long held out the grass is yellow in the garden
it misses your green hand

in the crease

Between your smile and your hand sifting flour 

I find my footing, this is an obsessions, 

to find the path to make of the bread- a meaning 

in the crease of your wrinkles, 

I find my homeland, how the wrinkles 

of the olive tree, like olive skin generate newer blood

this ancient being has no heftiness

I find my energy in the lightness of your step

cane-bent, but like sugar-cane, you still stand tall at church 

perched on the old desk, that is pinned to the glass

I find my reassurance that once young 

can mean a potential of the future folded in a wrinkled crease 

between your smile and your hand 

I find the remaining bits of thread for a thob

a dress, stitched gold and red

the colors of royals and peasant, contained like my homeland 

on cloth, wrapping around your hands, grandmother.