Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It's a Sewer Rat - Caitlin Seida (poem)

Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that's seen some shit.

It's what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world.
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.

It's the gritty, nasty little carrier of such diseases as
Optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across your path
and
Bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It's a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.

Listen, - Barbara Crooker (poem)

I want to tell you something. This morning
is bright after all the steady rain, and every iris,
peony, rose, opens its mouth, rejoicing. I want to say,
wake up, open your eyes, there’s a snow-covered road
ahead, a field of blankness, a sheet of paper, an empty screen.
Even the smallest insects are singing, vibrating their entire bodies,
tiny violins of longing and desire. We were made for song.
I can’t tell you what prayer is, but I can take the breath
of the meadow into my mouth, and I can release it for the leaves’
green need. I want to tell you your life is a blue coal, a slice
of orange in the mouth, cut hay in the nostrils. The cardinals’
red song dances in your blood. Look, every month the moon
blossoms into a peony, then shrinks to a sliver of garlic.
And then it blooms again.

Point D'alenon - Barbara Crooker (poem)

La dentelle des reines, the lace of queens,
and the queen of laces.
A veil made for Queen Elizabeth took 12,000 hours
and had 12,000,000 stitches.

I
In French, it is la dentelle, which has nothing to do with teeth. Yours would never
be featured in a glossy ad-crooked, the color of old ivory, but they're yours,
part of the body's sweet ruin. The same shade as the linen thread used to make
Point d Alenon in ten complicated stages, twenty hours to fabricate each inch.
This was the lace that enchanted Versailles. All those threads weaving, looping,
tracing a pattern which was sometimes hidden, often impossible to see clearly
until the end. Only a senior lace maker could blend the work of many hands
into a seamless whole that nothing could pull apart.

II
You and I have traveled many roads, like the one that led to the coast
of Brittany, where we ate oysters, drank cold white wine by the sea, then made
love at night with the window open. Another was dark and hung with trees;
we rode in separate lanes in the same car. Yet another led to the cherry
table, the whole family together, a turkey steaming brownly on its plate.
These roads twist and turn, part of a pattern we don't have the distance
to see. Every road we've taken, even the time apart, is part of our story.

III
Needle lace is the height of lacemaking. Every time you touch me, you add
another curve to the motif. The pattern, usually a rose, is designed on vellum,
reinforced with tissue. I've planted roses in every house we've lived, picked
off leaves with black spot, drowned beetles in a jar. A single bud blooms
on our kitchen table. The lace maker embroiders the flower's outline
with silken cord to add relief to the work. You edge my perennial borders
every April. Then the interior is filled in with a finer thread, a variety of stitches.
I seldom cook the same meal twice each season. Spring means salmon and sweet
peas; summer, tomatoes and basil; fall, roast pork with garlic and cauliflower;
winter, sausage and white beans with rosemary. A fine handkerchief medallion
takes three days work. A good marriage takes us to the end of our days.
To produce larger pieces, all the medallions are sewn together with a thread
so fine, it can only be detected by expert eyes. Stitch by stitch, our lives
have been joined now so intricately, only death will snip the final thread.
The invisible stitches interlock, and the pattern reveals itself,
roses flowering in endless summer, suspended in a fine white net.