Beginnings: An Ordinary Year

Knowing I was hoping to get a better creative balance in my life, a dear friend gave me a journal and a book of poetry for Christmas -- A Field Guide to the Heavens, by Frank Gaspar. The poems have an ordinariness to them that I find particularly appealing, and since I've begun reading one a day as part of my morning meditation practice, I'm finding I'm writing poems of my own in response.

So I thought I'd publish them here, and attempt to keep going throughout the year.

Herewith, the first poem of an ordinary year:

Hard to sit

I find it hard to sit these days:
My thoughts tumble in like puppies,
lively, curious, plump with desire
and hungry for recognition,
flattening the thin green blades of wisdom
as they clamber over one another,
reveling in their familiar closeness,
their fuzzy warmth,
the proximity of nourishment to feed their wiggly souls...

My breasts ache with the longing to feed them.
Some other darker vision wishes
the flattened blades would rise again and score them,
so they'd run away,
and quiet might return.