A Ceremony of Lessons
Why are we called
to motherhood
without a seminary
teaching how
to be a sun
and not a storm,
to bathe our children every night
in holy water,
to prepare their sacrament
with reverence,
to bear with strength
the sacred burden
of our love?
Hunger
I used to fill myself with all the sweetest food, until
I grew so big it frightened me.
I’m hungry,
hungry.
Who’d believe
I was a five-pound preemie
incubated like a hatchling,
air so pure it could have blinded me,
the milk of many mothers
keeping me alive?
My hunger’s not a metaphor. At most,
a simile:
as hungry
as a hummingbird almost erased by frenzy of desire—
as hungry
as a glorious white pelican, tail tilted up,
head in the lake to satisfy three stomachs.
Words were found and I did eat them.
As we near the end
I turn again to you.
Will you still lie with me,
surround my hunger
with the truth of bodies,
wordless as the flight of birds?
_________________
Note: Italicized lines are from Jeremiah 15:16, KJV; and Archibald MacLeish
Celebration of Life
My sister has evaporated from the slide show
like an old perfume.
Picture after picture flashes by—
girl hiding braces with a tight-lipped smile—
bride in white with stephanotis—
bride in blue, a crown of roses sparked with baby’s breath—
old woman wilted on an old man’s shoulder, giving in.
Enter my foolish ghost, I acquiesce...
and Nothingness becomes its own caress.
Has she discovered
only Nothingness?
Her name was Dolly Gordon.
Now her name
is scouring the shrubbery for her, the clouds.
Not finding her, it wastes away.
She is a blossom dried and pressed,
flaking into stardust
spreading out into the Nothing
and the Everything,
contained in all the living flowers.
__________________________
Note: Italicized lines are from a poem by Dolly Garter Gordon, published in 1060’s.
My spirit so high it was all over the heavens
--Li Po
My mother used to lose me purposely
when I was two, to see if I could find my way
among the shelves and knees,
the empty dresses swaying over me.
Last night—again—
that murky nightmare—
driving home from Oakland—
dark—roads tangled—
grimy fog—dead signals—
signs obscured—my car
careening into badlands—
That’s when I usually wake up.
But this time,
I was in your slipstream,
following your lead—
your silver Honda
flood-lit
in the halo of my headlights,
trailing star-shine.
“And the gold of that land is good....”
Genesis 2:12
There was still snow in Innsbruck,
early April, you and I new-married,
sitting on a lift-chair, swinging low
above the cold and rocky Eden
of those early days.
So many mountains and so many lakes,
so many meadows overlaid with snow,
so many cities with their freeways,
castles jutting out of history,
and supermarkets selling winter strawberries.
We’ve seen the nakedness
of Eden—bare-boughed trees recuperating
from their fruit, collapsing floors,
exploding pipes, torn circuits, trip-wires arcing fire.
The knowledge baffles us.
But this is Garden—Garden—
all of it—
the Eden of our lives.
There is no wisdom to be found in Eden,
just this strange geography of grace
and you and I.
Joyce Schmid's poems have appeared in Bridport Prize Anthology 2023, New Ohio Review, The Hudson Review, Five Points, Literary Imagination, Poetry Daily, and other journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, "Natural Science", is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press.