Lament Poetry

All posts tagged Lament Poetry

Bittersweet and Bitter Root

Published July 18, 2012 by rlmcdermott

Look what life
has done to me–
season after season
growing in this
blasted place,
fixed beneath
a paper tree,
watching you
not seeing me.

A flower in
a sunny place,
you turn your
head so often
that I can only
hope one day
you’ll see me blooming
all the colors God
forgot to give to you,
all the colors that
have seen me through.

Bittersweet
and bitter root,
all your turning
is a madness
that the sun
has forced on you;
while I am watching
from the shadows
hoping love will
see through you.

Visiting Aunt Mae

Published July 18, 2012 by rlmcdermott

Seen and
not heard,
we sat in
straight-backed,
wooden chairs
our feet barely
touching the
floor, our hands
hidden underneath
our dresses–
trapping the
words in
the warm
expectancy
of our thighs.

“Keep this
one for me,”
you would
say, passing
the word
along in
the moist
knot of
your fist;
and I would
take it, never
unraveling
its mystery,
burying it deep–
a stigmata of dreams
that we shared
in the long Saturday
afternoons spent
sitting in the
dark parlor
of a woman
who would
die of cancer
at the age
of thirty-five.

Love Poem

Published July 12, 2012 by rlmcdermott

This is the way to love a man–
pursuing him down dimly-lit theologies,
wrestling him to the ground,
undressing him with your eyes
until he is only bleached bone.

Jacob knew this as he lay
prostate on the ground beneath
the furious muscle of his lover’s arms;
his heart beat in his chest
as if a god had touched him
and not another man.

The excuses we make to ourselves
when we love, not with the senses,
but with the deep, murmuring
memory of a time when flowers
grew inside our cells and we
were all pistil and stamen and
certain that connection was only
dependent on ourselves.

Poem in search of a flower

Published July 5, 2012 by rlmcdermott

You are a flower
growing on the
side of a hill
held up only by
the wind. Your
season is short
and there is no rest.
You are beautiful
every minute,
every hour,
every day
of your brief life;
you cannot escape
from being beautiful,
it wears you down.
Every eye claims you–
the bee,
the bird,
the beetle
and even the sun
braiding the tall grass
like a young girl’s hair.

Long Season of Waiting

Published June 28, 2012 by rlmcdermott

I wonder why
for some of us
life is like a long
season of waiting.

Does the cone flower
know the brevity
of its dance;
its one brown
eye blasted daily
by the sun–
can it see
anything
but the sky?

I’m a flower too
and my season
has been long.
For me, there
is no fall
in this place
just an endless
summer of grief.

I am unnatural,
a seed lifted
by the breeze
and carried here–
distant from the prairie,
distant from the tall grasses,
distant from the meadow lark,
and distant from that softer
season when the earth
puts on its gray hat
and takes its flowers home.

The Apple Tree

Published June 12, 2012 by rlmcdermott

When I was
seventeen
I was old–
a girl in a window
about to be brought
and sold by grief.

The tree across
the street
knew my name
and called
it every night
to comfort me–
a murmuring refrain
of leaf on leaf.

I asked it questions,
will I be happy,
will I find love,
will I survive,
until it could
not answer–
so overwhelmed
it ceased to sing
and stood silent.

My only friend,
that tree, stopped
singing to me
because it could
not bear my sadness;
and in the fall it fell,
yellow, gold and red,
it bent its head
and wept us both
into a living death.

Kyoto Botanical Garden

Published June 1, 2012 by rlmcdermott

What kind of trees
were they that
broke the color–

all tall and green
and dancing
in the slow sunlight
of an April afternoon?

Women in blue
kimonos stood
beneath the
delicate branches
snapping pictures
digital and bright.

Children played,
young mother’s
strolled, stooped
old men finished
with their lives
sat on stone benches.

An artist crouched
in a flower bed
like a wounded animal;
linen canvas stained
with a furious red.

I had come here to meet a
god and found instead a man.

We are not seen by the people we love,
but are loved by the people who see us.

That afternoon,
five thousand miles
from my home,
someone saw me
and asked where
I was from in
perfect English.

Beautiful Vampire

Published May 23, 2012 by rlmcdermott

How many years
have I waited
in this place–

no shadow
sheltering me,

no song
giving comfort,

only memory
holding me
in its closed hand?

Then one day
I asked a question,
threw it in the air

and there you were–
a creature, different
yet the same,

tortured by a demon
that has so many names
it thinks that it’s a god.

And so for you;

I’ll wait beneath
these paper trees
for all the sunsets left to me–
I’ll be the water in the fire,
the blackened stone,
the insect at the end of day
all leg and tender bone.

Job Description

Published May 23, 2012 by rlmcdermott

I grew outside your
window. I came every
evening and knocked
at your door. I
kept watch in the
sky while you slept.
I was there, I was constant
and I was invisible.

I was the moon,
I was the shadow
in the field at sunset,
I was the red poppy,
the blue hydrangea,
the yellow coneflower.

This is who I was
and who I wasn’t;
I was all things
to you and I was nothing.

I will never love
like this again–with
such an open hand.
Remember when you
can remember nothing;
I was the song in the wind,
the flower in the garden,
the moon in the moonlight,
the memory in the forgetting.