ludicrous without the laughter
this
Absurdity

sun baking villages of wild flowers for dead bees
bare earth torn to discover luminous oil
what are we doing?
why are we here?

why are the floods pouring from the sky?
Extraordinary tears
from lives spent
no more
to be seen again?

summer mountains
getting covered with winter snow
why are the polar bears
floating on glacial ice away from their livelihood
Why are the seasons changing,
from spring into winter
and from summer into the unknown
why are the whales swimming
to the shore?

Did we rewrite the wheel of time?
did we change the drumming of the drummer
without asking why?

The cotton clouds above me
silently scream as they stream
into the empty sunset
in the darkness of my mind

I have heard to act like we are
walking on our grandmother's face
when we take a walk on our earth,
What would grandmother say
if she were here today?

Stop!  See
the basil buzzing with a bee
Listen,
let your eyes
fill with the light of hope,
feel it,
and
let
this
gold
ray
touch
the
sun
in
your
mind
to
illuminate your landscape....

...I remember,
I remember why we are here
and what we are doing

don't let
someone else's
thoughts and actions
tear your earth apart

let the earth sneeze
let the bees breeze
let the sunshine awaken
let the dry rocks get covered with river clouds
let the tears fall,
touch and listen to grandmother

if the old footprints on her face
do not say I love you,
how can this next step say
I love you?

Her thoughts, gathered on the in-breath, are misplaced on the out-.

As her memories float free of their moorings, ninety summers fill the late-afternoon room with a kaleidoscope of people and places: a young girl in a home-made dress plays tag with her brother in a Provençal orchard; a dark-haired teenager waits at a station fiddling with the yellow star pinned to her cardigan; a Milanese tailor embroiders freshwater pearls onto a snow white wedding bodice; and - over by the window - a dashing young cavalry officer, with eyes which reflect my own, stands in the shade of a blue jacaranda.

‘J'ai oublié,’ she whispers as I nuzzle her cheek goodbye.

You may have forgotten, Bubbe, but I have not the stories you have told me.

I used to wake up missing him, as if we didn’t spend almost every waking minute in each other’s presence. As if I didn’t hear his voice more than my own.
“Your shadow doesn’t belong to you. I know where you’ve been.”
“I have no reason to lie,” he would recite to me.
That was our nightly tradition.
I would watch him sit across from me at the dinner table,
telling me that he never did mean to hurt me, with my heart on his plate.
I packed ahead of time, and reorganized my regrets to make room for our relationship.
I crumpled up the letter I wrote and put it in my back pocket.
I couldn’t bring myself to explain why I had to leave him; my absence would be devastating enough.

He would make his fabrications fit into the palm of his hand and smack me with them.
I was born and raised by the backhand of heartbreak so it was home away from home when I ran away to him.
Instead of standing up for myself
I wrote poetry so hot that I would burn his mouth every time I tried to feed him.
He was a better cook anyway.

My grandmother, when I sought her wise council,
told me that I should accept the pain and try to make something out of it.

I remember when I tried to make love out of my pain for the last time.
He clawed my spirit out of me, put it under my head like a pillow.
He laid on top of me, grinding into my pelvic bone, making heat that burned my skin.
The bite marks on my chest stung when his sweat dripped on me.
I closed my eyes and saw the manifestation of my fears.
My body finally gave out after running from my ******, and he came when I did.

As he slept, I cleaned the blood from under his fingernails.

She started with the dirt.

and so it began:
salty dreams dripped like rain water from her heart,
sounding like bass drum parade when
they bombarded  
the seeds below.
Boom, bang.

and her symphony began.

Her eyes only rested softly on the peach petals and
green she wished to see one day,
trying to line them up in her mind.
Finding order in the colorful plumage
one could grow and

Row by row
She began to sow
Her own
beauty.

Every day spent, relentlessly push-pulling
with the thorned roses and monsooning
for her scars. She’d bind their branches and with scarlet
fingers, she’d bless each white petal she found
with blood across his white flesh,
so that he too, would not be taken for some
innocent fool, so easy to
pluck apart.

She lived this way for many years,
routinely carving out her heart for the
flowers in her garden.

for this notion
of keeping something pure

in a world so filthy that the only
place a flower has to grow is
in the mud and
the only way a flower is supposed to be able to grow pretty
is with“Fertilizer”.
Then one day,
she finally realized that all fertilizer is,
is ****.

That very night she built herself a greenhouse
with her bed at the very center of the garden
and she threw out all the fertilizer
she’d bought at Lowe’s on sale earlier that week. She began to
practice sleeping with her thoughts and her cultivation,
the smell of fresh mud and potpourri
tormented each other the minute her head hit
her grassy green pillow and she would let her garden fester,
foliage bounded by her fear.

Once her fingers began to wrinkle and her voice no longer
bounced back at her from her fortified walls,

she found herself

tangled in the freely flowing vines she had once
kempt so well. The peach petals and green
made her heart squeeze as they grew lovingly,
between her toes
to her chest
and around her neck.

As she dreamt, they did not suffocate her
like she believed they would, one day long ago. The
dirt felt water-like beneath her back, soothing her bedsores and
sounding of the bass-drum parade from many years ago,
when she listened closely. Her eyes fluttered with
every bang and she found her peach petals again-

all so chaotically contained, their colors
stifled by the jagged walls she built for herself.

Taking in their unique passions and thorns
in one steady breath, rainwater fell for her
flowers softly this time. With every drip-drop,
each rose played his own sweet note.
Triangles and marimbas and strings
serenading her into bliss.

We can only dream that she found beauty
in her cultivations, just as they
found
in her.

-----------I weave my grand                     mother's spirit to life--------
             when I paint with my             words what she dreamed
             in her life.  My grandmother's kimono sat in the dark never
            worn; so needs a     dusting--I lift it up      into this light to be
           seen, to be heard,      to be felt, fabric of          loving  heart
          dreams to be.  It's     not perfectly shaped   or tattered or torn,
         rather fermented       beyond her time  to      take form.  My
       Grandma loved  to        eat her white rice          she ate thirty
      seven million grains      of rice by the time         she reached her
      104-- Born on a             sugarcane plant'tion         on the coast of
     Oahu, a child in               the tropics then a       teen in Japan. Her
    family returned to          their roots to learn,    & grow, reenter the
   cultural force. She                discovered her              new talent as
                                            ------------------------------
                                  ­              K  I   M   O  N  O          
                                               ­     A R T I S T
                                            --------------------­----------
                                       Kikuyo  Yamamoto became
                                     liberated as an artist and then
                                     her life changed as her family
                                    demanded she leave her position
                                   and marry away to a Japanese man
                                    who lives in California (my Grand
                                    father).  The matchmaker said it
                                     would work really well....She
                                   endured life as an American farm
                                     wife, then life in Japanese intern-
                                    ment camps. Five  children, nine
                                    grandchildren...Dear Grandmother
                                     I know you had lots to surrender-
                                           I honor your life as mother,
                                           grandmother, and artist --I
                                          wove this poem in the form
                                       of  a kimono for you  May your
                                         spirit rest in peace. I love you.