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Three Poems by Luci Shaw
Being, a message to myself
Like bees busy on purple heather
there are those who seldom rest,
who leap about accomplishing things,
affixing stamps, defrosting a loaf,
pulling a weed, flipping a switch,
cramming a screen with a frenzy
of words. Doers who hope
to change the world, job by job . . .
You can barely hear the others,
like trees, monuments with veins,
rooted, shedding a scented
shade, a spring ceiling of green,
a seasonal rug of gold.
I’ve always felt an affinity for rain,
its palpable relief at letting go.
The round oak table by the window
resting all afternoon under
its shifting tablecloth of sun.
Indeterminacy
Two tourists pass in a crowded bus.
The hairs on their bare arms touch,
for a moment meshing and warm,
then not, the door of the bus
already closed with a thud and a hiss,
a fragment in history, a swift
receding. That flash-point when
the future brushes against the past—
we notice it only after. Too late.
Now is already over; if
we stop to look, it’s gone.
The heart in my chest—in bed
at midnight I shudder to its thump.
A-gain, it repeats, A-gain,
each iambic beat ending at
the instant of assertion. Showing up
only as one in a trail of alpha sparks
tracking through the corridor of
memory’s cloud-chamber. Never
on my bus trip will that again
happen again.
Gardener’s remorse
I have always welcomed my perennials
but today I will celebrate also the arrival of
horse-tails, their primitive vigor thrusting up
under the fence as if the Third Day of Creation
were just yesterday. In penance, as redemption,
I will begin to touch the earth more lightly.
remembering to walk barefoot in the soft
forest so that I make no bruit nor break,
and where the concrete cracks I will let
the slow velvet of green gather in the concrete
cracks. Without resentment I‘ll allow every
varied weed to assert itself again, crowding in,
confident, sifting its secret seeds under lavender,
heather, cotoneaster. Cedar seedlings prickle
from the earth, hoping to start a small forest;
it could bring shade for our house. I will treasure
the gold exuberance of buttercups and the generous,
feathery legacy of dandelions as they age.
I notice the mole’s dark castings, mottling the grass,
hidden from their lowly architects. From the path
I will applaud their diligent constructions and refrain
from trampling them in anger. And the deer
stalking up from the creek—buck and doe—
clipping tulips so that only brief stalks poke
from the soil—they are fully forgiven. As I fight
second thoughts, I notice the slugs’ rainbow slime
on the paving stones and the crusts of jade aphids
on the lupines. Determined, I resolve to regard them
as adornments. As for the gravel, the pale
pebbles that have surfaced through soil,
through time, I will leave their small bony faces
to remind me, so that I will not forget.
Luci Shaw’s latest books are What the Light Was Like (WordFarm) and Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation (Eerdmans). She is also the author of The Green Earth: Poems of Creation, Water Lines: New and Selected Poems, and many other books. She is active as a workshop and retreat leader on poetry and journal-writing, and lectures widely on topics related to the creative process. She lives in Bellingham, Washington. Learn more about Luci at her website, www.lucishaw.com.
Copyright © 2006 Luci Shaw. All rights reserved.
This page was published in November 2006
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