Tag Archives: pleasure and pain

Pleasure/Pain for dVerse Poets

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This is the dress made for me by my sister, Betty Jo, in 1957 for the parade celebrating our town’s founding fifty years before. The theme was “fairytales” and you have probably already guessed that I was Little Bo Peep.

Our dVerse  Poets assignment today was: Now write a list poem that begins ‘These I have loved:…’ of the everyday things that are important or precious to you. Be specific, picking out tiny details, and don’t stop until you get to the bottom of the page.Finish with ‘All these have been my loves’. Leave yourself time to refine your draft.
Here is my answer to this prompt:

Pleasure/Pain

These I have loved:

Tastes abandoned, former loves,
outgrown pleasures, bleached white gloves
worn for church or the senior prom,
fresh cherry pies cooked by my mom
from cherries pitted by our juice-stained fingers.
How memory of both labor and reward still lingers.

The cold bite of a walk-in freezer on a sweltering summer’s day.
The smell of sweet clover and itch of hay.
The press of leather constricting toes in my first pair of three-inch heels.
The squeak of rusted bike chains and the crunch of wheels
on gravel roads in our small prairie town,
the pelt of hailstones coming down
deafening on the metal of our brand new ride
with myself and sister sealed, terrorized, inside.

Hurtling across the street to the last school bell’s pealing.
Scabs peeled from skinned knees too slow in their healing.
The squeeze of painful memories of love gone wrong,
resurrected by the lyrics of a song.
Placing flowers on a sister’s grave,
remembering the past gifts that she gave:
that tiny dress that she once made
for me to wear in the parade

Recalling the pleasure and then afterwards, the pain
of the swell of memories the heart no longer can contain.
Grandma’s crazy quilt, of family clothing scraps stitched thin and wide,
left abandoned on the bed wherein my sister died.
Homes left to the lives of others, families left for other lives,
memories like bees swarming to other hives,
memories crumbling in boxes stored on shelves,
these bygone relics of our other selves.

All these have been my loves.

And this is that same dress, 69 years later, brought to me by my niece Cintra when we met in Peoria, AZ a few months ago. She had found it in her mother Betty’s things when she passed away a few years ago.  More mingled pleasure and pain.

 

Blade and Balm be

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Blade and Balm

Here in a crevice near my heart,
the grief I field does not depart.
Lodged in the depths beneath my skin,
it harbors pain trapped tight within.
Lifted from the depths below,
my heart succumbs to thoughts of woe.

Its edges cut like sharpest steel
insisting I recall and feel.
The wild tides tumble me again,
salting my tears with waves of pain.
Its murmurs stir, then rock me calm.
offering me a soothing balm.

Ancestors reach up from the deep
to lull me to a restful sleep.
These bruises that I bear today
are the price that generations pay
for life that harbors treasures, too,
along with sadnesses we rue.

For Wordle 575 the prompts are: grief field skin depths edge salt murmuring bruises ancestors lifted crevice wants

Quilting Bee

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Mask quilt by Deanna Taylor
The good, the bad and the ugly. All part of life’s crazy quilt.
Pieces ready to be joined
Broken thoughts
African motif quilt by Deanna Taylor
Detail from mask quilt
This is a lovely poem written by my friend Isidro and painted on my wall. It is his version of a story I’d earlier written entitled “In Mexico There is Always Music.” We all keep contributing to each others’ stories.

(Click on photos to enlarge and to read the rest of the story.)

Quilting Bee

I chop my life up into bits, incongruous and varied:
struggles, victories, tragic loves, the day that I got married.
Clashes create beauty as pains mix up with cheers,
making a lovely pattern as each new piece appears.

In stories as in patchwork quilts, all bits are not roses.
Part of the beauty comes from the pain that it exposes.
We put our art together, fragment after patch
and no pattern emerges if all the pieces match.

A convenient truth of works of art as well as that of life:
beauty’s found in perfection, but also found in strife.
Sweet berries come with brambles and each rose has its thorn.
Both great passion and great pain predate the time we’re born.

Perhaps pain is the awful price that we have to pay
to experience the pleasure of when it goes away.
So with the ugly fabric that finds a place to fit
when contrasting beauty is stitched in next to it.

Life is a lovely story, but not all of it is writ.
Why were we created if not to add to it?
In taking all the pieces we’re provided with,
We take part in creation by adding to the myth.

 

 

Prompts today are patterns, chop, clashes, cheer, incongruous, convenient and brambles.

Cold Assurance

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Cold Assurance

I’m tired of writing alone in my safe room. I crave the cold mountain and my gasps in the thinner air. The threat of clouds. A bleeding sunset that seeps behind an obscuring peak.The small terrors of things heard but unseen in the dark. The press of stones in my back as I roll over in my sleeping bag. Evidence through sensation that I’m still alive.

The comfort of light,
but no form without shadow.
Nature’s cruel truth.

A Cold Mountain Haibun for dVerse Poets
Go HERE to read the prompt.