Journey of the Heart

I was moved by a couple of folk to write this poem, as well as my own sense of loss… Grief and I are close friends. When I stop crying I know that is when I need to worry. Lately life threw me a curve ball but all will work out, as it always does. I hold faith close to my heart and believe in prayer.   So I offer this up, because we all know what heartbreak is like and getting up again is the hard part when we want to hide and let go of all. ~Art by by Johann Heinrich Füssli~ How Many Ways Can a Heart Break? Loss wears an odd face. It is my newest friend Whose toddler died While he was 180 miles away. It is watching the man I love Make love to another woman, Night after night. It is loving a baby I didn’t have But was so close it should’ve Been mine. It is having love tease you into believing This one man will hold your heart Until he breaks it. It is having every man you ever tried To love leave you alone, again,...

Grief to me is personal and yet poetry gives me a way to share it… By sharing with you through the transcendent medium of poetic lyric and image -where meaning meets me where I least expect-, the deeply personal gives me more me! This piece was written a few years ago and yet it holds now on the edge of the evening. Sadness is always close to me.  One of my teachers told me my beauty rests in how I hold my sadness because it is so much a part of me. And yet even more so today, years later, I find what holds me is the grace I find within the poem: the way I can graze what aches in my heart and yet find its release in my hands, as if each prayer held a bird learning to flap its wings and as my hands open, take flight. Grief   Like a cricket’s legs, sadness Waxes on the wings On my back few can see As they are rays Of light holding shadows As if shade from a tree Where I find quiet, a reprieve From the s...

This poem is about life and death, exhilaration and depression… I wrote it quite a few years ago and it is, in many ways, a sort of autobiography. A reflection of how, if I stop and listen, I hear the sound of Time, marching... And it is my own footsteps I hear, echoing through the years, from physical birth to physical death, my own footsteps, carving out new roads, new journeys, across my soul. Photography by Katerina Plotnikova I’ve written happier - ecstatic, celebratory - poems about this journey and these ‘deep’ moments. “Quicksand”, however, represents the no less valid times when the darkness descends and all I can do is listen to the footsteps, and try to keep on breathing, when to struggle is to sink and I just have to hope that my feet will find solid ground before the quicksand swallows me completely. We all have out own versions of quicksand in our lives. This quicksand, too, is a part of the journey to be embraced and valued. These times are pr...