Holland Julia

Tag: poem

  • 7/19/19 moon landing

    7/19/19 moon landing

    I’ll sit here and listen to jazz music

    Add up my pennies and

    Hope for the future –

    Did you know

    Fifty years ago

    The first men

    Landed on the moon?

    I’ll sip coffee and schedule

    The next few days till

    They’re too full to

    Give me time to overthink

    On the improbabilities

    And all the endless possibilities 

    Of life –

    Did you know

    Fifty years ago

    We flew a rocket

    To the moon

    And by some miracle

    It landed?

    I’ll sit here

    And try not to be overwhelmed and

    Over stimulated by

    All the people talking around me,

    Try to drown them out in

    Sweet trombone and saxophone –

    Did you know

    Fifty years ago

    The moon had no footprints and then

    We stepped there?

    Planted a flag there?

    Acting like a rock floating in space

    Can be owned?

    I’ll sit here

    After shopping for bed linens and pillows

    All morning,

    After driving down a six lane interstate

    And feeling it a miracle that I survived it –

    And did you know

    That fifty years ago

    The first men landed on the moon?

    Sent us back video footage of it?

    Making it so that

    People like my father heard 

    Those legendary words

    From the boxes in their living rooms –

    Did you know

    Every day bears an echo

    Of past things?

    One year from today

    I will look back

    And smile on who I am today,

    Where I am today,

    The things I did today – 

    One year from now

    It will be fifty-one years from

    The day the first men

    Set foot on the moon

    Because you can’t stop the past

    From echoing.

  • 4/8/20 unburied

    4/8/20 unburied

    I’m half awake.

    They keep throwing dirt on me

    Trying to bury me,

    But I keep squirming –

    Half determined to live,

    Half friendly with death.

    I can hear it, the scream of

    Trumpets, the bleat of lambs.

    It’s the fasting time, but oh

    I’ve fasted from so much more

    Then I was ever ready to.

    Pour the wine. It’s bitter on 

    My tongue. The aroma of food

    Turns my stomach.

    Maybe I should fast forever.

    Maybe the celebration

    Is untimely. Why dance

    When we’re all still dying?

    Nothing makes sense anymore.

    So bury me.

    Yet –

    Yet, I’m so terrible at

    Making up my mind. I squirm again,

    Straining my eyes to see 

    If I can catch sight of a happy ending.

    Somewhere there’s a child dancing.

    She has no fear of death;

    Her raised voice makes my eyes burn.

    I reach my hand down

    Through the earth, past roots

    And rocks and creeping creatures,

    To find, with my finger tips,

    The softened edge of buried paper.

    Maybe, I think, half rising,

    Half tugging, on this fragment 

    Of forgotten joy – 

    Maybe, it’s time

    To call my Hallelujah

    Back from the grave.

    Oh! If only you

    Could remind me how

    To return to life again.

  • 9/9/2020 Bitter

    9/9/2020 Bitter

    It’s bitter
    Like coffee
    (Flakes of ginger,
    Not enough sugar)
    The way it goes down
    And burns to
    The stomach-
    The idea that I can’t heal you,
    Can’t make it right can’t
    Undue the crimes
    Against your body-
    Mortal beings stuck together,
    Tangled string,
    Answers to heavenly questions
    Stuck in between-
    The cracks in floorboards,
    Cigarette burns on
    Restaurant tables,
    The words we pass back and forth,
    The smiles we force,
    The laughs we use
    To break up tension-
    To say it’s alright when we all know,
    We are not fools,
    We all know
    The cost of realness, sometimes
    We don’t have the change-
    Foreigners on an earth that
    Does not love us
    Not one of us
    How could it, it’s
    Broken with us it
    Takes our bones without thanks-
    The rain is the tears of those
    Told not to cry
    It’s not easy being human but
    If we drink coffee
    And cry together maybe the hurting
    Will burn us less.

  • 5/24/22 Cicada Song

    5/24/22 Cicada Song

    It’s mosquito weather, at last –

    I am beginning to wake from my

    Long slumber, at last, at last.

    Bry bone stacked on top of

    Dry bone, relearning the language of

    Sinews – and the wind will come from the hills;

    I know it will come.

    The wind! they whisper in

    Expectation, poised on the peak,

    Prepared for flight –

    The wind! That the horses gorge upon,

    That the swallows are made up of,

    That the cicadas are tasting for the first time, tonight,

    Filling the night with their roaring –

    And through the day, if you stop long enough to listen.

    At night there is nothing to do but listen:

    To my roommate’s tv playing long into the night, 

    To the gentle murmur of my diffuser

    Coaxing me to sleep, 

    And to the song of the cicadas,

    Tasting life, life! The breath of the world,

    Tasting so sweet to them;

    They, in all their new innocence!

    Today I was asked, through tears, 

    Why the world keeps going.

    She said she wanted it finished,

    To got to Paradise, where we can all be together

    And there are no more tears.

    I don’t have answers for this.

    I am asking the same things

    In a different language learned from

    Different sages. Still they answer me not

    Any better –

    Ask the Fates, ask the Fates! Those sisters three – !

    I am of three sisters.

    Perhaps this is why

    Often I can’t tell what’s coming,

    But sometimes! I see so clearly – !

    Maybe, I’ve been passed the eye.

    But this is what the prophets, sager than me,

    Have to say: Lo! A new heaven and a new earth;

    Resurrected ground.

    Resurrected sky.

    The old will pass away,

    And all that is good, wake again –

    Dry bones upon dry bones,

    Relearning the language of

    Sinews, and the Breath from the hills –

    The Breath, the Breath from the hills – !