primrose meditation

(I passed these flowers on the walk to Fiesta the other day.  I used to pick them all the time as a child, with my grandma)

your petals are sensitive,
like the pink-veined delicate ears of a cat.
you're teacups of pollen, you are tiny cups of light.
you have spangled yourselves all over the vacant lot,
on my side of the chain-length fence, and the other.
could you care for separations?
you children of light, you cannot even see them
you tiny lights, you are as many
as sparkles on the sea.
does nature ever see things like a chain-length fence?
could I draw a line upon the surface of the sea?

a mind like grackles

Mind, they told me you are a bird

Because you have such a gift for flying.

I’d like it if you were some great white thing

with wings that spanned the horizon, sea to sea

plunging in and shooting up

to the stars.

But honestly sometimes you are like a grackle

scavenging among things that are dead, like bad memories

picking at trash other people have left on their tables

with a voice like a car alarm, that can only scream something like fear

who stays with the other grackles, all the same, and will not often

go or even wish to go any higher than telephone wires.

I know you can sometimes be a mourning dove

softly crying, the naïve slow one so easily hit by cars

who weeps with joy to hear the morning come

who loves your friends, and every spring

so glad to come home.

Or sometimes, like the mockingbird- small and gray and clean

Alone, and not alone,

watching and listening

singing back in a voice like rain every ugly or beautiful thing you take in.