Let This Be Blessing
You have your grandmother’s almond eyes.
You have your mother’s hands.
You have the last thirteen years with me.
And you will have the rest.
You took two baskets of magenta and purple
Orange flames showing through,
You hung them on the iron crook
I wasn’t strong enough to plant.
The afternoon was warm, the sun bit my tender skin.
I cried because I never thought I’d be here,
Thirteen little years in.
A dragonfly visited our garden, a tiny teal caterpillar
Tickled my arm as you found a native bee.
Let this be a blessing.
(Incense smells like lilies to me,
Oh, this sounds like praise to me).
We have planted, we have lifted, we have disturbed the land
But I think it accepts us.
Let this be a blessing.
Back to our garden, back to your dirty hands,
Back to our round and full and bright and summer,
Back to our rosemary, mint, our foxglove, our butterfly bushes,
Back to our floribunda, our world.
You were panting, hauling mulch,
Then tenderly tucking honey suckle, pumpkins, berries
Into the black Hudson dirt.
”Did you ever think we’d be married,
Working on our garden?”
I choked up, unable to give a pat reply,
Smeared with pollen and sun,
An old grief flickering in my brain,
An old, beloved grief reminding me:
The dead are with me even here.
The past is with me, even in life.
The past is with me, even in happiness, even here.
And that is a blessing
Mother Tongue
Scholars will tell us
Certain words have survived
Since the dawn of human speech:
Mother, fire, fish, and forest,
Worm, and knot, and sweat, and string.
(You’ve been here before.)
(It’s not holy, but we’ve been here before.)
Knowing this, I try to tell the story,
I try to trace the history, I try to wake the dead.
I try to pronounce the primordial word
Because it’s still there.
Mother fire fish and forest,
A litany in my modern head.
These are a mother tongue,
This is all a prayer.
There is a meristem line
Of thought, of feeling, descant and rhyme.
Is the mother tongue still spoken?
Does the harp string still sound?
Does the prayer still reach that high?
(How much of her can you hear through me?)
(How much of her belongs to the dead?)
Like the words, certain treasures have survived
Since the dawn of human love:
A baby’s hand on your cheek, a path in the woods,
A gray dawn coming through the teeth of the mountains.
There is a story,
There is a mother tongue,
And I hear it now:
As the taste of the new storm coats the evening,
The gravel on our street sends up dust.
Rain is coming again,
There is a path in the forest,
There is a meristem line.
There is still the mother tongue,
There is still the blessing of time.
Specials Menu
Nothing is going as we planned,
The world has turned so cold, so rude.
The gyre yawns and sighs and
Belches out another stooge.
Nothing is going as we planned,
The falcon’s mangy and he’s losing altitude.
Any minute now this could all be fucked,
But yet I fell in love with you.
I went to the diner at half past noon
”Refill on your coffee?” (Please)
You were thin, unsure, pretty shy
But when you smiled your dark eyes crinkled
”Oh, shit,” I thought, and swooned.
All things considered, this sure is strange,
But, ”as romance is a breakfast food”,
You ordered eggs and taylor ham
And, dolce ragazzo, what could I do?
Nothing is going as we planned,
Everyone is so petty, so cold, so crude.
Pundits lie and politicians bark,
Idiots continue to disrupt –
The whole fucking world seems to have given up,
But I have not,
Because I live for love and I love you.
Liz Reilly is a poet and fiber artist living in the lower Hudson Valley Region. Her poems are informed by literature, paganism, sexuality, and grief. A graduate of the English MA program at Rutgers, she has been teaching Composition and Literature since 2012. She can be found at local readings and workshops as well as haunting the internet ranting about current events, history, and miscellaneous things.
