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It’s so weird to end a month on a Sunday – and it always feels a little sad to end the daily practice of NPM poems. I’ve had fun playing with cinquain. I don’t feel like I’m any better at them, but I do love how the five-line poem can be both so concise and full, depending on syllable count. I found I preferred the Crapsey; ten syllables for an end line feels simply too long – and too hurried, everything all at the end.

Today’s poem is a bit of a cheat; this isn’t news from the world, but from the microcosm of my garden. My alyssum sprouted and immediately burst jubilantly into teensy-tiny (I’m quite squatted down for this shot), scented flowers, so I figured that was the best news of the world I could get. Happy May, friends – fresh breezes, sunny days, more rain soon, and plenty of flowers. The best of the season to you.


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Greetings! Welcome to another Poetry Peeps adventure on Poetry Friday!

Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge in the month of May! Here’s the scoop: we’re writing a ghazal. The ghazal (tripping correctly from the tongue as “guzzle” – with apologies to those of you giving it a French flair as I used to) is the oldest poetic form still in use, with roots in Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, and Hebrew traditions. A ghazal is made to be sung, and is a couplet-based form with internal rhyme. (Find out more about it at Poets.org.) As always, the topic is totally up to you, but the Poetry Sisters are continuing with our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION. You have a month to craft your creation and share it on May 26th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.


I feel like I need to set up a camera in the garden, so I can capture the milometers-per-hour growth of my seedlings. We have hit the 80°F mark this week in my part of the world for the first time in 2023, and the acceleration of — everything green is just gobsmacking. We’re happily stashing windbreakers and pulling out our short sleeves. …For the most part, anyway.

Last week at my Sunday gig (choir #2), a friend stepped behind the pulpit and slipped off her cardigan to put on her robe. She saw me watching her and winced. “I don’t usually wear sleeveless dresses,” she explained hurriedly. “My arms just look so bad…so crepey.”

Of course, I fussed at her about it, as we do with friends. She looked gorgeous in her spiffy dress, which I’d complimented the moment I’d seen it and I reiterated. I told her it was a gorgeous day and she had a gorgeous set of arms that needed to feel the sun on them. And then we settled down to warm up and rehearse.

But, I kept thinking about it.

Poets, my friend is eighty years old. She is a size six, maybe a seven. She swims one hundred laps in an Olympic pool three times a week, and walks two miles the other two days. She sings in the choir with me, and she’s louder and has a longer range. She sports a perfect layered cinnamon-brown bob with nary a silver strand twinkling, as well as perfect manicure at all times. More, she’s kind and funny. And she’s still worried that her upper arms look bad.

As I said to the Poetry Sisters when I mentioned this, good Lord, at some point we HAVE to be enough.

I mean, I get it. I don’t display my upper arms. Having been various sizes of fat my whole life, even when I was really lifting weights and playing sports, they were still… squishy in a way that was socially unacceptable. Bigger than other girls. I never wear sleeveless things outside of the house. But, I will not be eighty years old and still worrying about this crud. I. Will. NOT.

And so I wrote a lovely sonnet to my upper arms. The style of Pablo Neruda to me is layered and rich, loquacious and bountiful — just like my arms. He writes a lot of love poems, heady and redolent with beautiful language with which he woos the reader. I choose to attribute that to his Argentine heritage, a beautiful country filled with beautiful people speaking a lilting and glorious (and gloriously complicated, I say from the perspective of sixteen hundred days on Duolingo) language. Using the mentor poem “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII (I don’t love you as if you were a rose)” I speak of my arms – and your arms. And all of our arms. May we embrace ourselves, and our flaws, not like something about which poets sing – some romanticized, perfect thing. Rather, may we embrace ourselves as if we’re children who may or may not be sweaty, muddy, covered in pet hair, widdle, puke, snot, or tears and still – cherished, and worthy of love.

I Do Not Love You ‘As If’

I don’t love you as if you were a summer fruit, warm,
Firm, perfumed and toothsome:
I love you as an auntie loves a defiant toddler,
Exasperation woven from skeins of amusement and resignation.

I love you as the corner of the yard the cats favor,
Dense blooming bush beneath which they lie concealed, tails twitching,
Keen to pounce and leap and rend, replacing peace with panic,
Forcing conflict and change, challenge and confrontation.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or for what,
I love you austerely, without expectation or prediction,
I love you like this because I know no way but this, to embrace
The flawed and the fleshy, the crepey, creased, amd changed,
Complete in this moment as the sweet-fleshed perfection of a ripened peach,
Complete in this broad-shouldered, wide-bellied work of cradling a wailing world.


There’s always more poetry. You should see what Liz wrote. And here’s Mary Lee’s. Tricia’s poem is here. Michelle K’s poem is here. Heidi is “Neruda-ing” (yes, that IS a word) here. More Poetry Peeps will be checking in throughout the weekend, so don’t forget to come back and read the whole roundup. Meanwhile, Poetry Friday today is hosted by Ruth at There Is Not Such Thing As A Godforsaken Town. Thanks, Ruth, and Happy Seventeenth Blog Birthday!

Well, back to the garden, poets. I’m sending you out with a hug, from my arms to yours. Happy Weekend, you are loved. ♥

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Years ago political conservatives complained that California offered too cushy of an experience for the unhoused. Giving people money to live on just encouraged more indigence, they argued. And so, parties changed, and funds dropped, and… still people came. Temperate weather, cuts in social services for the mentally ill, and higher and higher costs of living have created a perfect storm. And yet – housing set aside or the unhoused in SF, the cushiest of all cities, according to some remains empty. 990 units – or 10% of the total housing – isn’t being used. Why? Because some of it is little better than a cardboard box. In a tent you at least have your choice of neighbors, in a manner of speaking. Violence and drug use and theft run rampant, and for those trying to get better, or house children – it must be terrifyingly unsafe feeling. The housing situation – the unhoused situation – is a shame and a rebuke to right-thinking people. How are we going to get out of this mess? And more importantly, get our fellow humans out of this mess?


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This past winter my little brother’s girlfriend was riding her bike to the store in Brooklyn and was hit by a car. Three weeks ago in a city closer to home another cyclist was struck, and this time didn’t make it. As the sunny days continue, cyclists are taking advantage, but those touched by tragedy are being more mindful, thinking more about safety – I know I am. I hope drivers are, too.


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Monday, the Supreme Court ruled state governments (specifically five counties in my state) may seek damages from fossil fuel companies worsening the climate crisis, and lying about it. That is kind of shocking – and while still being hotly debated, that the Supreme Court took this step openly admits that we have a problem and not all of us are engaged in being part of the solution. I wonder where this will take us.


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It was the most eventful winter in this state for the past seventy years. There are still houses collapsing under the weight of the snow in the northern edges of our state, but despite the persistence of the snow, the season has changed, and runoff has begun. The rivers are historically high – to many state officials, catastrophically high. One of the pictures on the front page of the paper showed spare life jackets just hung on a sign – the desperate Parks and Rec officials hoping the public will do something to at least try and stay safe. They’re also bracing themselves – because human beings traditionally aren’t good listeners, and there will be fatalities. Meanwhile, the rivers are icy cold, and gorgeous.

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Jewish and Christian religions both embrace that bit about “the stranger” or “foreigner” within your community written of in the commandments. It’s repeated – and repeated – and even enshrined as part of the Seder service, which commemorates leaving Egypt, remembering that once the Jews were foreigners in a strange land, and slaves.

I took the title from the Hebrew words of that phrase – which I’ve heard read beautifully. Even though I’m not Jewish, I can see clearly the point: none of us came from here, we’re all guests. Guests on the planet, guests on the land, guests in our communities. We are, frankly, terrible guests. We could do better.

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One of the many, many things popular culture gets wrong about Pandora is that she didn’t open a BOX, it was a jar, a pithos that the Greek used to store all sorts of things. In the myth, Pandora opens the jar, and unspecified evils fly out into the world. Hastily, she then closes it back — trapping one last evil, hope, inside. The arguments about what that could possibly mean began immediately thereafter.

One interpretation of the tale is that hope is… deceptive. When viewed through my rather jaded lens this week of anything changing in reference to gun violence in our country… I can see that.