Leaving Home

Lately transient thoughts tremble
at the edges of my lips,
just inside my mouth,
like bees ready to swarm,
prickly with the heat

and not as tidy as you might imagine bees to be.
The allure is dreary
with the potential of being stung
and gravity of the world
just heavy with worry and shame.

My eyes shift
from the present moment
to a proxy of real life
somewhere behind the flinty spark
of this day.  It is here, in the moments
before sleep takes me to the dark waters
of rest.

I am breathing fully into these lungs
and shudder before the release,
a few signs that show the way
from gravel between your toes
and the unending larder of words,
one after a line is sweeter
than a signal that it is time to leave home.

New Life

for Clair

Nature has spoken again
like a voice of the angel,
this time to my daughter.

Her new kitchen is warm
with cinnamon and green
with her sweet love's passion;
routines of morning tea
and something barely sweet,
like a moon waxing toward fullness,
round and luminous with awe.

The angel is watching them
become a family,
medicine to all the losses
of champions and innocents.
They are healed as their life grows roots
and the wings of a child.

She commits again,
the servant of children,
and cried when she revealed
the outline of her new life.