organic prizes tended affectionately
primed by summer’s passionate heat and BB King’s blues
quenching warmth, a gathering of sunlight kisses
red ripe to tango with your tongue and mine
slip into my backyard to delight in this tender flesh
this ready to please moment soon closed for the season.
© Alicia Grimshaw 2018
you beside, never
behind, together we face
forward fearlessly.
© Alicia Grimshaw 2018
Senryu
Your separation started with a small knot, then the winding began. Strings of storybooks, twined through nights and days of countless fresh starts, repeating circles. The looping of stories wound through our shared days. Up and down on the life school rollercoaster, back when I used to hold your hand. Our faces in the wind a side by side scream of surprise moments you reached out, adding to yourself adding another layer of becoming. While some saw mangled routes and loose ends I envied your brave expanding, overlapping leaps of curiosity to solidify your center. Now you roll down new streets with layers of perseverance over boyish charm a masterpiece touching lives I will never meet. I hope you never stop winding over that small knot, tied while I watched.
© Ali Grimshaw 2021
This poem is dedicated to my two amazing sons. I am grateful to be your mother.
Your judgmental gaze cannot melt
the lines of my mistakes, they have become
collective beauty I hold as my reward for living
unimaginable shapes to fill with crayoned hues
I am my own coloring book
not available for purchase
© Alicia Grimshaw 2018
With all that is currently happening in the U.S. and the world, I feel the need to reshare this poem, Visiting With Chaos.There is an opportunity in the messiness of life. Will we choose to be loving learners or give up to fear?
Thank you to Vita Brevis, The Modern Poetry Magazine for publishing my poem. Click on the link to read it. – Visiting With Chaos
Sending love and a reminder that you are not alone.
Ali
what you had always assumed
to be solid, now soggy sadness
water warped windows with
a view misguided, bended
memories altered the truth
will you forgive yourself
for all that was unseen before?
© Alicia Grimshaw 2018
I will sing you comfort when your voice forgets the notes.
I will sing you a clearing to feel the warmth on your back.
I will sing you courage for days when you need to hear the music again.
I will sit in silence listening to your song
when you have forgotten it exists.
© Alicia Grimshaw 2018
Your bones scream to rest
an anvil on your chest
no dawn comes lightly.
Invite the monster to sit with you
it gains ugliness with denial
put your arm around that which
you don’t want to hold.
© Alicia Grimshaw 2018
“When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it.” – Jenny Lawson’s book Furiously Happy
A love note to my mother. The one who lead me to the forest.
© Ali Grimshaw
“If you expect me to answer my own question, I confess that I do not know.”
They call me an adult. Yes, I have learned to make spaghetti sauce, to drive a car. I have mastered some dance steps and can write a concise email response (using spell check to avoid the embarrassments of the past.)
But what have I really learned in my days of clouds passing, night thundershake and the revisiting of another spring? Days of scarlet fever, owning mistakes and reimagining?
With another ring around my trunk, adding layers of curious, I know that I know less with passing time. Like paint peeling off an old house I am more than one color. I live as a revolving door to exit and enter, each time with a different view.
Growing up I thought adults had all the answers, lived in comfortable sureness. Shocked disappointment crashed down when the truth broke through with no answers in its hands.
Why didn’t mom tell me adulthood didn’t come with all the answers.
“She had only one explanation for this fact: things have to be transmitted this way because they were made up from the pure life, and this kind of life cannot be captured in pictures or words.”
1. Illusions by Richard Bach
2. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Written for the dVerse challenge, Bridging the Gap: Select two quotes from two different books. You decide whether you want them recklessly random or slightly/significantly more intentional. Then, construct a poem using one quote as the opening line and the other as the closing line. The blood, sweat, and tears will come while filling in the space between. You may modify the quotes to fit your poem’s rhythm or rhyme scheme, but just be sure to provide the original quotes, authors, and works in a postscript.
flashlight batteries - Ali Grimshaw 