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Category Archives: everyday poems

Homesick

19 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by marie in everyday poems, journal, travel

≈ 4 Comments

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everyday poems, Grandma, home, just because, travel

grandma

Out the door, across the circle parking lot
past the man who wipes down car windows for pesos
Walking quickly quickly
away from green taxis
with Guadalupe holy cards taped
to the dashboards for good luck
almost running now,
parting thick hot air
Into the cool dark chapel
where I breathe in and smell my Grandma’s house
and converse with her until the sun has
fallen down.

(from summer 2006, Mexico)

Beirut

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by marie in everyday poems, Lebanon, travel

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everyday poems, home, Lebanon, travel

DSC00363

Strange how my nostalgia will soon be to
Watch as your old men sit
Steeped in the argileh-smoke of their own reminiscing
They pull up their chairs and set their coffee on the ground
Dreaming of the days before pervasive car-exhaust air
Oh Beirut
Yesterday will always be the sunlight of your today
How else could your bread-cart bikes and fruit-sellers
Find their way from then to now?
How else could the ritz of your Downtowm
Rise from bullet holes?
And if a golden past has given way to an unfamiliar present,
Tell me why does Charles Aznavour return, wrinkled,
To sing for a new generation
While expats come home to seek a future?

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(Written before I left Beirut in 2012, before knowing my life would be permanently tied to Lebanon)

Manhattan Memories

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by marie in everyday poems, New York City

≈ 2 Comments

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everyday poems, New York City

IMG_2844

It’s homecoming today and
the normalcy of a morning walk
down Lexington Avenue, you in
your suit and I in my thick amber
sweater, holding your hand between
sips of coffee and looking about
distractedly, because you’re alongside
me and my mind can safely wander.
Then returning to a bowl of oatmeal
with strawberries and savoring it as I
savor you, watching last night as
you dressed, just as you have all
your life before I had access to
your ordinary as I do
now.

Transience

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, journal, New York City, travel

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home, roots, travel

Dear Apples,

When so much is in a state of up-in-the-air uncertainty, what is it that roots you?  It seems this life of constant motion requires a perpetual diving, downward and deeper to the discovery of beginnings.  I can look ahead with expectation and anticipation, but first I gather up the core parts, so that I don’t unravel as I go.  Do you understand?

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There are two excepts I’ve read that talk about it; the first from William Butler Yeats and the second from Adrienne Rich:

“Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders begin
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”

and

“..I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent…”

I think that “something more permanent” is what’s found in the rag and bone shop of the heart, and it is home. Home can be carried around inside; it must be. It is comprised of the small anchors set up in new places: the rituals, routines, spaces, images, scents and sounds. It is also the intangible relation to our life-sources; of family, friends, lovers, children, mentors and the natural world. I think all of life is this kind of conversation with the world around us and the upkeep of the relational exchange.

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