Written a year ago and read at my mother-in-law's memorial service by the author.

My Grandmother's Garden by M. Bessac

I am bunches of wildflowers with their roots ripped up
I am the weeds your mother cannot get rid of
And the stained red poppies, held in place with a cup
I am the big willow tree, who watched you learn to love
I am the California sweet peas, so stubborn as to only grow in the summer
The orange tinted daffodils your father bought ...so long ago
The mistletoe your little sister always takes down for Mummer
I am the thorn-prone ivy that only grows in the snow
I am everywhere, it is time you know
For when it is my time to go
I will be anywhere, everywhere in that lush green paseo

As soon as I sat down
the seven year old girl
offered me gum
and showed me a postcard
of the airplane we were in.
She was writing her mother
whom she had just left at the gate,
smearing her love
in blue magic marker.
Then she pulled out a drawing
she had made of the wind
and one of a cloud
and a man who had ladders
for legs and eight arms
extending eight hands.
After the heavy body of the plane
lifted off the ground,
she held my hand and talked
about her flute teacher's birds
and the eels she had bought
in a bait store and let loose
on the beach, each one
slithering into the dark
of the green waves,
returning to what she said
she could not imagine.

The best defense is offensive

The turkey vulture,
a shy bird ungainly on the ground
but massively graceful in flight,
responds to attack
uniquely.
Men have contempt for this scavenger
because he eats without killing.
When an enemy attacks,
the turkey vulture vomits:
the shock and disgust of the predator
are usually sufficient
to effect his escape.
He loses only his dinner,
easily replaces.
All day I have been thinking
how to adapt
this method of resistance.
Sometimes only the stark
will to disgust
prevents our being consumed:
there are clearly times
when we must make a stink
to survive.

~Marge Piercy

 Antigone wrote: 

Marge Piercy: Right To Life

A woman is not a basket you place
your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood
hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted
rain, any more than you are.

You plant corn and you harvest
it to eat or sell. You put the lamb
in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to
butcher for chops. You slice the mountain
in two for a road and gouge the high plains
for coal and the waters run muddy for
miles and years. Fish die but you do not
call them yours unless you wished to eat them.

Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceberg
lettuce. You value children so dearly
that none ever go hungry, none weep
with no one to tend them when mothers
work, none lack fresh fruit,
none chew lead or cough to death and your
orphanages are empty. Every noon the best
restaurants serve poor children steaks.
At this moment at nine o’clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can’t get
Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away. Next door a husband
and wife are sticking pins in the son
they did not want. They will explain
for hours how wicked he is,
how he wants discipline.

We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes
of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold shares
in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

by William Stafford

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot—air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.

• BY RAYMOND CARVER

Elegy
Patrick Cabello Hansel
 
On your face, your beloved face,
your sweat skinned face, the remnant
grace of mother, father hidden there,
the wind of years, the triumphs
and the savagery, on your springtime
harvest nightfall sunlit face, let me
linger there. Let me touch it as
a baby, my fingers unfolded gently,
my voice harboring no words, let
me touch my face to your face,
Father, let us be here, face to face,
in this land we have sown and reaped,
in that time that has no wind, no
words to worry, let us touch,
Father, let us linger, let us be.

Dark Charms
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here's the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

NEXT YEAR
Let’s buy a flat in Paris, France,
And I will worship you, my dear,
In lovely rooms with flowering plants.
Me, a somewhat endearing old relic,
A jowly but still charming man,
And you my darling, rather angelic
Pack me off to a nice hotel
With Egyptian sheets and fresh-cut flowers
And room service is 24 hours.
When I die, which I will do,
Wear black for a month or two,
Then look around, find someone new.

Everything but God
from far away. As you drive toward them
across the country they are visible—stony
and roosted on the land—even before the towns
that surround them. In New York you come
upon them with no warning, turn a corner
and there one is: on 5th Avenue St. Patrick's,
spiny and white as a shell in a gift shop; dark
St. Agnes lost near a canal and some housing
projects in Brooklyn; or St. John the Divine,
listed in every guidebook yet seeming always
like a momentary vision on Amsterdam
Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone
to pass by. The candles' anonymous
wishes waver and flame near the entrance, bright
numerous, transitory and eternal
as a migration: the birds that fly away
are never exactly the same as those that return.
The gray, flowering arches' ribs rise
until they fade, the bones so large and old
they belong to an undetected time
on earth. Here and there people's small backs
in prayer, the windowed saints' robes' orchid
glow, the shadows—ghosts of a long nocturnal
snow from a sky below when we did not yet
exist, with our questions tender as burns.

Cloud veil’d moon in the
West. Dawn streaks to the east. Hap-
-py Birthday to me!

 ScottN wrote:
A fave.

 Manbird wrote:

Good. Make this place beautiful...

 ScottN wrote:

I love it!