While I've Been Waiting

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My manuscript is out. Four agents, one publisher... all reading the whole enchilada. All 175,000 words. It is a waiting game, and while I have some writing I could be doing to further the story, I feel a bit stuck in a publication limbo. So what am I doing? I'm writing poetry instead. Here are a few of the poems I've been writing:

Sometimes Beauty Greets Me

Sometimes beauty greets me
first thing in the morning,
alighting on my still-dreaming life
like a butterfly 
searching for solace
from dewy-sweet places.
In the afternoon, beauty finds me
as a hummingbird might
with a zip-zip flash 
of the almost-seen,
leaving me to wonder
if it was there at all.
When the sun sets
beauty welcomes me as an old friend,
and holds me steadfast
as the light of the moon
with her shimmer 
dancing on my skin.
But it is in dreaming, 
that beauty comes to me and stays.
With the intertwined loom 
of memory and creation,
my life is woven
one glimpse of beauty at a time:
The smiles of a child,
the lingering glance of the beloved.
the whisper of wind in the old trees,
preparing me to wake with the sun
and search again for the butterfly.

If You Walk With Me
​
If you walk with me, know this:
I stop for thistle flowers
and the smell of honeysuckle.
When birds warble in the field
I still my footsteps
to hear if it is me they wish
to bring into communion.
I rest sometimes
on a lonely shaded bench
and wait for the world to forget me.
And it does.
They do.
The insects whirr.
The frogs bleat again for a lover.
The birds go back to tending nests,
the trees dancing around them
courting the sky.
So if you walk with me,
know that we will not walk at a brisk pace.
We will not walk with the world outside us.
We will not walk without conversation
even if we speak not one word
between us.
Know this if you walk with me.


Wherever Water Washes Over Rocks

Wherever water washes over rocks
stumbling both toward and away,
there I remember my first dream.
Thousands of voices
whispering watery together.
Liquid sound moving,
the echoes of permeable ghosts
or shadowy ancestors.
Words spoken in an indistinct language
such as water speaks,
sounds eager to return
to an unknown accord
that calls to them
through the whisper of gravity.
Such a sedulous source
welcomes us too;
the dream-voices
and me
​and you
and all of our first dreams
and the water of streams
moving to reunion with the sea.