Awe is the wisdom of sweet sticky handed laughter. Let loose to tumble through doorways of my day. Eyes of wonderful, cherishing new gleam on faces found. Mystery of how this connects to that which we would have never guessed was related. Unexpected sparkles in the corner. © Ali Grimshaw 2021 Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft - Join us at dVerse HERE
Briefly
Stages and ages of crimson edges
crisp rounds, centers of golden.
Veins will remain long after the delicate
sections have disassembled themselves
to join the soil for another cycle.
These elders don't fight seasonal changes.
Through the quiet and loud
or bend and wave of storm
they receive while sheltering seedings below
forever willing to show their nakeness
in the darkest of times.
With empty arms
while full of life within.
Their offerings a mosaic
of temorary color.
© Ali Grimshaw 2021
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I can’t imagine my life without poetry. How many times has a poem shifted my thinking, invited my tears of release, or shined a light on the awe of being alive? Each poem is an invitation to slow down. Without them what could I have missed? Therefore, I am grateful to others who promote poetry and for each poet brave enough to share.
Thank you to Susi Blocks for nominating one of my poems from The Short of It for The Pushcart Prize I am one of six to be nominated by her. My poem, Thunderstorm Conversations can be read on Susi’s blog, I Write Her. If you’d like to be featured on The Short of It, click here for the submissions guidelines.
Thank you to the poems, let’s keep making space for them to arrive.
Ali
As the virus careens spinning down our long road. The dust has yet to settle from the wheels. Slow motion particles fall as we sift silently through glittered remembering. Was that last month or yesterday? As I am here reaching you are there still only through airwaves and yet I hear your love. © Ali Grimshaw 2021 Join us at dVerse Poets' Pub for Open Link Night HERE
What happiness can arrive when sunlight's retreat paints leaves cherry crush, berry swirl butterscotch eye candy walking through an ordinary Monday your hand in mine, we breathe the awe street lined masterpieces colored by a lack of chlorophyll less of something created more today © Ali Grimshaw 2020 Another yummy tree in my Portland, Oregon neighborhood.
Painted leaves sing in unison Unlike music, their song is soundless harmony. This orchestra of glow soothes the tempo of an internal pounding from a day of instruments that refused to play the same song. Fall catches you with muted volume a serenade of equilibrium let the blushing colors sing you home. © Alicia Grimshaw (rewrite of 2018 poem)
tasting sadness on your skin I lean into the space between your peach-warm cheeks glow while shadow-stones play on Autumn's windowshade head to heartbeat I hold you to my chest feel a shift to calm a small sigh from your lips warmly weighted © Ali Grimshaw 2021
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"Remember your dance? The young girl inside me calls out, "Remember?" Dad told me how, as a baby, I sat on the floor rocking side to side, just smiling. Later I was known to start the day with only one shoe my frustrated mother shaking her head while the school bus left me behind again. I was a girl who thrived climbing trees, running through woods I wasn't hyperactive, just a mover. Running brought temporary relief. The only dancing I knew growing up drill teams of painted girls, performance dancers that wasn't me. Finding social dancing in my 20's was like a drug. Swinging partners in dancehalls escaping thoughts I didn't know how to turn off. Anxiety, the never ending loop of ideas. I found myself in the music. I floated free. It is never too late to turn the music on find your sway, sashay surrender to internal movement Your body has not forgotten. Your brain has many incredible ideas but your heart is the one who knows how to dance with the world. Listen inward find the place where your freedom resides. © Ali Grimshaw 2021
“When Gillian was 8 years old, her hyperactivity — which earned her the nickname Wriggle-Bottom — led her mother to take her to a family doctor. While he examined Gillian, the doctor put on some music and asked Mrs. Pyrke to leave the room with him. “Out they went and the minute they had gone I started to dance to the music, even going up on his desk,” Ms. Lynne wrote in her autobiography, “A Dancer in Wartime” (2012). “What I hadn’t noticed was that his door was one of those beautiful old glass ones with etched designs through which the doctor and my mother were watching.” As they observed Gillian dancing with abandon, she recalled, the doctor said: “There is no trouble with this child, Mrs. Pyrke. She is a natural dancer — you must take her to dance class.” – Gillian Lynne, Choreographer of ‘Cats,’ Is Dead at 92 from The New York Times
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Let's linger in the Autumn glow dusk is on its way to cloak us with comfort ease our worries loose to fall. Pausing here we become one with this seasonal scene of hush before continuing our saunter harvesting what matters most from this day. © Ali Grimshaw 2021 Join us on dVerse for Quadrille Monday HERE Photo take in Portland, Oregon 2020. View of the Willamette River.
What’s missing? she asked herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t know her strengths. It wasn’t that her imagination had run off to have an affair with someone better. It wasn’t that she expected easy.
What was missing now was the risk to hope again. To dream bigger, like a five-year-old coloring with abandon on the whole wall. Markers in hand, in full out play. As far as each arm could reach. Without fear of intersecting lines, sharp puncture points or curvy wide spaces.
What’s missing is the leap, the willingness to let it unfold and seeing herself capable of not only the journey but strong enough to feel all the textures of emotion like carpets of days she had walked through to get to now. She knew her heart would break every day and that just meant that it would keep growing.
Top of the hill, feet on the pedals, hair in the wind, she is going.
© Ali Grimshaw 2021
“In the Celtic tradition it was said that we suffer from soul-forgetfulness. We have forgotten who we are and have fallen out of true relationship with the earth and with one another. Thus, the path to wellbeing is not about becoming something other than ourselves or about acquiring a spiritual knowledge that is essentially foreign to us. It is about waking up to a knowledge that is deep in the very fabric of our being, and it is about living in relation to this wisdom.” – John Philip Newell, “Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul,” The Daily Good
flashlight batteries - Ali Grimshaw 