Tag Archive | death

4/27/10 Patricia A. Hawkenson’s Reflections – Spring Deluge

(Many of you know that I have not been in the best of health for over a month. I am now on a medical leave, hoping for less stress, and more healing. Thank you for your patience. I appreciate those of you who I see still coming back.)

Clouded

Spring brings the deluge,
the pouring of sky’s soul.

Here I drip
many days’ deluge
finally feeling
ready to fall.

Iris

Watering Can

Eyes blurred,
I planted iris bulbs
crooked.

First shoots,
curved leaves leaned,
proved my pain.

Yet today’s stem
of tomorrow’s flower –
straight up.

Straight down,
a pint of past beauty,
for a bud of hope.

Screams Drift Up

Only her eyes moved,
darting back and forth,
my god, oh, my god.

His eyes open,
starring into the sky;
she knew him, dead.

They took him
in hushed tones;
she alone on the hill.

Her screams bent
allowing no words,
just agony.

Her body curled
sobbing with her softly,
then gut wrenching.

He took her life.
Even her pockets
were empty.

Push Me, Pull Me

I have reached for the tissues
more than five times
and the pile of my agony
still grows.

Tomorrow I will pick them up
and toss them in the trash,
but today the floor
is where my heart
will lay.

Somewhere around
tissue eight or nine,
anger will come out of the box
and I will cry

no more.

The Concert is Canceled

I have never been a fan of singers
whose voices lift
the spirits of thousands.

And, Wind,
I am no fan of yours.

You roll my child’s ball
making her run
far away from me.
You curl my shoulders,teasingly tossing my hair
to obstruct my view.

Every second I have lost
from seeing
my sweet child’s face
in playful laughter
can not be returned.

Wind,
do not sing
your beguiling song here.
The price you charge,
too high.


Thanks For Letting Me Know

Darkness hid every drop
of rain that evening.
I could hear only
the tiny pings on the roof.
I felt the heaviness
of pressured air.

There was no line
between day and night,
between calm conversation
and drips of cutting cynical words.

Unwarned came the torrents,
the angry cry of clouds.
Finally, when it returned to a drizzle,
soft and steady,
the rain became my comfort
as you went out the door.


The Night Hid the Fog

They all stood on this hill,
stomachs hungry
for more than the rinds
of day old bread.

Yet their voices are lost,
wispy like dying fires
after the dead coals
are stomped and ground.

We have not feed them,
filled their need,
while our own greed
has stolen their future.

Children can not play,
innocent in their day
when the sun only makes
cross shadows on the hill.

Trying to Find Myself

My large kitchen spoon
bent too easily
as I tried to dig
to China.

The top soil
was thin,
so thin,
barely covering
the rock below.

My mom
wasn’t impressed
by my efforts then.

I just kept
on digging.


According to Me

Please keep
those tasty,
tempting,
tantalizing,
thesaurus teasing
bites of you
in this place where
I devour them.

According to me
it is easier
to fight
the robot codes
that to fight
my weight.

I will be
the Biggest Loser
if you bail and post
where I can’t
read your words.


Do I Blame the Squirrel or Rabbit?

Yesterday, there was one leaf,
green and growing strong.

It was the promise
of one tulip,
the mystery
of its color,
red,
yellow,
pink,
growing by the base
of my tree.

Today,
chewed off, again.
Just like last year.

I could blame
Princess,
my white squirrel
who circus walks the top
of our cedar fence.

I could blame
the rabbit,
who doesn’t deserve
a name,
chewing his door in the bottom
of our cedar fence.

Or I could blame
the fence.

Selfishly
holding back
this year’s view
of the carried,
buried treasure
of my neighbor’s
tulip bulbs.


Sr. Mary Aloysius

Sr. Mary Aloysius,
fingers sliding
over pearlized beads,
keys jingling
in an unseen pocket,
bends down
to tie her black shoes tight.

Then a quieting finger
covers her thin lips.
She points to God
who apparently
was still looking
down
on us
even though we had already checked
our laces
and our manners.

I wanted to say
she was making more noise
than us,
but little girls
wearing tissues
for our missing chapel caps
already had enough

to pray about.

To Remember the Day

Somewhere around fifty
our brains shifted
from abstract thinking
about the events
of the day,
who is going where
and what they’re going to do,
to the minute details
of puss oozing
from our ears
and sciatic nerve damage
that radiates down our legs.

To remember the day
that meds our should be increased
while calculating
the effort needed
to climb a flight of stairs,
we need to shift
our creaking bones
to a place where we
remember the day
when we were too young
to care that we’d grow old.

Two Scoops

Just when I think
I know it all,
the electrifying
realization
of your 2 to 1 ratio,
proves, once again,
the magnetism
between my spoon
and a quart of frozen custard
is justifiably intensified
by the viscosity
of my tears
and the volume
of her breasts.

Two Wrongs

Global warming,
earth’s demise,
heating arguments
conflicting
with knowledge
we all insist
is true.

Scientists can’t cool
the fiery tempers
of melting icebergs
and angst filled teenagers,
floating soul sisters,
colliding
and damaging
their sinking feelings

hidden

below.

He Knew That I Cut Snowflakes

He is thirteen
seen forever
by sensitive souls
who pass his hillside,
who hear his muffled
cry.

Scissors.

Duck tape
wrapped around
his mouth
his nose,
his eyes alone
cry.

Scissors.

I drive on,
no scissors
in my car,
my radio,
just a little louder.

Even Solomon Loved a Sale

A piece of paper,
value kept,
worth
fifty percent off
any number
of items
needed,
desperately
needed,
has now died,
died,
an untimely death
with the flipping
of the calendar.

Expired.

Hoarders lament,
tearing their treasure,
each half
now fifty percent
of nothing.

Hairball Island

Only an old cat
can chuck up
a hairball,
stringy,
stinky,
slippery,
that floats
like an island
in a sea of slime.

Only me
left to wipe it up.

That old cat
and I
ebb and flow
with my paper towels
and his rough tongued kiss.

A Spare Tire was in the Back

Wheels spun,
rolling down the road,
screeched us to a halt.

Time was my enemy of love,
held a hand up,
prevented our crossing.

No opportunity
to look both ways,
longingly down the road.

Then my heavy breasts,
filled past love’s capacity,
rested before they got home.

Damn flat.

Washburn

Chequamegon Bay
quiet as the foaming
washing of rocks,
slow as applebutter
spread on toast.

Where lupines wave
their purple spires
giving seed to
crumbling
sandstone churches.

Barren blueberries
dust of pine
buckets of smelt
batter dipped
and fried.

Then brandy slush
it all till snow
covers the land
marking my trail
home.

A Writer’s Fear

Anticipating adrenaline’s rush
mingled with salty popcorn,
the script,
the first sacrificial victim,
heavy in the weight
of the writer’s agonizing
choice of words
falls
to its live or die
ending
with the first reader’s
ominous words:

“I don’t get it.”

9/22/09 Patricia A. Hawkenson’s Reflections

Bridge Support

Connecting South Curry Street to North Curry Street,
the city begins its race toward progress
building a viaduct over the her garden
spanning three gridiron railroad tracks.

The coal dust settles as the trains roll by
with warning horns echoing off the concrete.
The cats begin to wander farther from home,
her concern for them not allowing her sleep.

Her fear settles on the train’s slicing wheels,
while her cats scurry from their grinding sound.
Their stomachs empty, no mice to chase,
rumble like the trains that scare them away.

She sings for her cats to come in from the rain
that nourishes the leaves of her buried potatoes
growing under the viaduct, not under the sun,
hardly producing a bagful to harvest.

The city waits for her elderly years to wither.
They want her land for a convenience store
where people can come in the dead of night
to buy their cats milk and a sack of potatoes.

Not So Black and White

Before being demolished today, the Skunk House,
with haunting empty rooms was an invitation to teens
who wrote on the walls and destroyed furniture
while stabbing a dressmaker’s dummy to death.

City officials, knowing my mother,
and thinking of possible items of value,
suggest she venture in to see what she wants,
perhaps there are books her children could read.

I beg my mother to let me go with,
not afraid of spooks or terrorizing ghosts,
or the stories kids tell of murderous men
and women who shriek in the dead of night.

I win her over with my false bravado,
so we creak open the door to let in the sun.
The boarded up house sighs dust in our eyes,
but it can’t detour us from going inside.

Dangling strings trip us from a smashed violin,
the sound of its music now dead.
Not knowing the price of the name
“Stradivarius,” we decide upon something else.

We go home with a chair between us,
brown plush material faded and torn,
nobody else to want it, or notice it gone,
or a book of poems lamenting the dead.

While our door is open, a white cat walks in
and I drop my end of the chair in fear
because behind it comes the Cat Lady,
a real living terror walking into our home.

Rushing behind my mother’s skirts, I reveal
my ignorance of haunting things
while my mother in her compassion,
hands over the kitten, unable to calm my fears.

Chalk Smears on the Sidewalk

She is small
allowing only eighty years
to peek out from her brown babushka.
She frightens us,
her language different, indiscernible
by children playing on North Curry Street,
so the taunts begin
with cruel slurs and chalk marks
that she can not understand.

She is alone,
save six cats who need her
swirling between her shuffling feet.
They gently purr,
with a language only she understands
as the rhythm of her snapping beans
waves her paring knife in our direction.
Rocking on her porch, she smiles
at the kids who curse her.

She is misunderstood,
save my mother who protects her
when she falls coming back from her garden.
My mother covers her,
with a coat and guards her from children
who laugh as potatoes roll from her bag
pinching their noses from the scent of cat
still swarming around her
till the paramedics come.

She is carried
from the viaduct to the safety of her porch
as the story spreads through the neighborhood.
We wait by her gate,
even without dimes promised by the mailman
who believe rumors of bones in the basement,
till my mother comes out to scold us.
The Cat Lady won’t shriek in the dead of night.
It’s time for us to go home.

7/19/09 Patricia A. Hawkenson’s Reflections


Tarnished Elements

The corner of her mouth
lifted at his gentle teasing
is now a tightened line
that is afraid to laugh.

And her shoulders sighed
with a nagging stiffness
that begged for his relief,
but his touch never surfaced.

Nightfall is her only solace
where his passing shadow
no longer has the power
to darken her brightest day.

Settle Down

Every day
unseen particles
drift down
from where you dance
and swirl up a storm
or punch pillows
as you cry
down a drought
and land in a whisper
on the surface
of every solid thing.

Neat freaks
will never take the time
to amass enough matter
allowing them to push a trail
of memories
into a dusty heart,
an accumulation
of yesterday’s unspoken words,
lingering,
waiting
for you to shake things up
again.

6/28/09 Patricia A. Hawkenson’s Reflections

Mr. G

Mr. G waited patiently
on the shelf next to his twins
and he saw them lifted away
one by one until finally
he was the last
to go.

Then the little girl
from her stroller reached
her arms as far
as they could stretch
and yet she needed her mother
to lift him down
to her.

The two became inseparable
as they grew to be great friends
who played and loved and slept
through all the adventures
that a child needed
to know.

But one day Mr. G sat
forgotten on concrete wall
when the little girl needed
two hands to hold her cone
and then she began
to go.

Later, she cried inconsolably
and would find no replacement,
for who can take the place
of the dearest friend
to her.

Years have grown her to a woman
with her childhood pictures
close at hand
showing a little girl
holding tight to Mr. G
as if she had a psychic gift
to know:

Mr. G would go.

Hand Tools

I brace myself
when the first one comes
with knowledge
of more to come.

For they build in threes
my auntie says,
trouble and sorrow,
and death.

And family comes
to help construct a wall
holding me sturdy
through the blurring
of the days.

But then alone
when they thought
me strong,
my façade is broken,
softened by the touch
of my cat’s paw.