Each Poem
I always mean to say more
than I do here as if that is what poems are for.
Chasing what’s needed
with or without the tools to do it.
Or standing in the sunlight on the coldest day
of the year and waiting for the healing to start.
Along with the patience to grow again, with a slow
love, with time for easing into what
comes next, petals opening in the dark,
old ideas no longer of use drifting up
and out into the light of day, airy stuff always.
I sit under the giant fan palm
in the winter oasis where the wildflowers,
the lupine, bloom wildly, a deep blue like a person
ready to fall in love again,
an act impossible to stop, the flowers in bloom,
inevitable, ebullient, utterly alive.
Charlene Langfur is a green, LGBTQ writer, an organic gardener, a rescued dog advocate, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow in 1972 with hundreds of published poems and essays. Read more.