our second beating hearts (the sixth week)

The only way to make a writing dream come true is to write your way towards it. The only way to live with good words is to search for them, find them, and love them. So over here on Mondays, I share with you some of the good words I've found throughout the week, and some of my own scribbles. And together, we write the contours of our second beating hearts. 

Good words I've found throughout the week:


Antonia for #ATLT at See Preston Blog: crosses, confessions, concussions
Betsy at Part of the Main: a mother-daughter valentine's tea (I loved the pictures!)
Julie at Ra(y)conteur: Mugs and Mentoring
Chris at from the smallest: Curse? of a Compassionate Heart?

A poem to hear sounding through your week (this one made me cry):


Meditation from 14A (Jennifer Maier)

And what if the passage out of this life
is like a flight from Seattle to St. Louis -

the long taxi out of the body, the brief
and terrible acceleration, the improbably

buoyancy, and then the moment when,
godlike, you see the way things fit

together: the grave and earnest roads
with their little cars, stitching their desires

with invisible thread; the tiny pushpin houses
and backyard swimming pools, dreaming

the same blue dream. And who but the dead
may look down with impunity on these white

birds, strewn like dice above the river whose name
you have forgotten, though you know,

having crossed the Divide, that it flows
east now, toward the vast, still heartland,

its pinstriped remnants of wheat and corn
laid out like burial clothes. And how

you would like to close your eyes, if only
you could stop thinking about that small scratch

on the window, more of a pinprick, really,
and about yourself sucked out! anatomized! -

part of you now (the best part) a molecule
of pure oxygen, breathed in by the farmer

on his tractor; by the frightened rabbit
in the ditch; by a child riding a bike

in Topeka; by the sad wife of a Mexican
diplomat; by a dog, digging up a bone

a hundred years in the future, that foreign city
where you don't know a soul, but where you think

you could start over, could make a whole
new life for yourself, and will.

And a poem from me:


Grandfather

The house died when he did.
It boarded us out, grew dust as a protection
over the tables, the fireplace,
the circle stained into the sideboard.

It closed the petals on roses climbing the white doorframe,
latched the gates, rusted the locks,
encouraged weeds in their savage pursuit.
It knocked stones out of the garden wall.

We tried to coax it back from mourning.
We wore black, vacuumed, sang too loudly.
Nothing.

Year after year, we walk into his absence,
the old smell of tobacco and shaving cream,

and the house remembers.

Love,
Hilary