Christmas Presence

 

 

I am here 

Warm blooded

In the icy dawn.

Pink blush to periwinkle blues

Paint the sky

Behind eyelashes,

Barren branches,

Heavy hearts hung high

Not just I 

sigh, exhale

thinking only of 

Others

whose day holds heavy fruit,

Hugs, in deep loss and great gains

ripe and rotten. I

Inhale the sharpness of

Those warm with love and

Those hollow in hopelessness.

Those that have just arrived,

Those that have long left,

Those that remain

In this familiar temperance

I feel

Here. And there

Goes, swift as the hours,

enduring as years

Ends and Begins

all Over and

Again.

 

 

 

Artwork by Hans Makart 1840-1884), 'Abundantia the gifts of the earth' in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Re-gifting: Oh, that old thing (I think I've had that)

When we do things
absent, mindlessly,

sometimes our former selves

sneak out, like this one, 

in this way;

when yesterday, I was wrapping presents

folding and creasing, pressing 

Scotch™ tape on the folds, I noticed
my own grandmother's hands

there-doing all the work,

while I just watched.

Bewildered. Behind.

This happens at the strangest

times...you may find yourself

triggered by a word

or the way we say-

that thing, that way, that

fires memory cannonballs...

And at certain times its a-scent,

an agreement of essence,

we remember thick as a waft.

Namely, a single note that carries a key

and pulls levers of attention coupled with

spinning axles, smooth and in place.

Our brain goes on, rolling with the ripples,

uninterrupted-until going nowhere in places

seeing both others past-you-go-and comes-and

brings you back here

not knowing how
it got there...

It is a gift of now, knowing.

Lost was the life

that went unnoticed by motion memory.

The set was changed, moved around

by your own history. Draped in black,
this mourning-

which is why we cannot deny we trip

over moved memories

that enclose the past

in my presents

while I am not looking,

sometimes I see

my forgotten family.