I am cocooned in a symphony of sound.

Each melody, specific,

Each accent, amplifed.

 ~

In the distance, a train’s engine rumbles

as it clatters along the tracks,

a low, mournful horn song drifts on the

dense morning air.

~ 

Every bird song is distinct –

Twitters and squeaks

Chatters and winnows

Some percussive

Others rhythmic:

A dawn chorus.

The clouds push it down to my waiting ears,

rather than allowing it to escape upwards.

 ~

The farm is my chamber

for a musical festival

where I am surrounded,

Delighted.

 ~

I shiver and smile

and pull my jacket close around me

the mist falling across my face.

The cottonwood in the distance

a ghost,

black and skeletal.

Like scouts, they arrive

quietly and unannounced -

soldiers of spring,

but weaponless,

only harbingers of the larger regiment to follow.

A footprint, more muddy than icy -

A bush, which upon first glance

is skeletal and withered…

on closer inspection,

east gazing buds timidly peek

towards the warmth.

Midday shadows grow stronger

as the sun steps

haltingly northward.

A bird

in its nest newly formed,

and eggs freshly laid,

cries warning.

Heat, in fits and starts,

struggles to break through the Arctic breeze-

asking it to go back north

until next season.

There will be stronger

and more glorious

soldiers to arrive.

Tulips, the Trumpeters.

Daffodils, the Flag Bearers.

The bees and the pollen, the Enlisted.

But for now, the land belongs

to the firstborn of spring.

]]> http://deblinne.com/poetry/248/feed/ 1 http://deblinne.com/poetry/abuela-mi-amor/ http://deblinne.com/poetry/abuela-mi-amor/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2015 12:42:22 +0000 http://deblinne.com/?p=105 Hair always dyed a shade of youth and vigor,remnants coloring the papery skin around her ears and forehead.Little round body that tells the hard tale of Mexican women-low to the ground for work and round in the hips for babies.Breasts

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When the perceiving heart goes haywire

And the circuits are overloaded,

a devil lies behind every bush.

Around every corner, a monster.

Some might mistake

The flashes of light for fireworks-

a display

of colorful brilliance

Indeed, it is short-circuiting,

Snapping and popping

with imaginary grievances

and the unspoken, unspeakable.

A big ball of raw wires

Exposed and vulnerable

To water, to air, to fire.

To earth,

Each threatening to short

the heart out for good.

The buzzing and popping..

Visceral and bone-deep.

Ground me.

Ground me.

Ground you, self.

Ground yourself, self.

But the sentient heart, haywire,

Is drawn to lightening.

It is a lightening rod, in fact,

And will not stop reaching for the thunderclouds.

Come closer.

Warm your hands near the fire of my heart.

Come closer.

Circle yourself around my ribcage

and absorb

the heat,

allow it to ease you into sleep.

Come closer.

Let your cold breath

melt into my hair;

bury your face in my neck.

I am heat

I am life

I am warmth -

come closer.

Winter is here,

but so am I.

So, come closer.

The moon arrives each afternoon

no sooner than it left, it seems…

The hours of weakened sunlight zoom by

as if being chased by

some great winter beast.

The rays hide to the south,

lurking behind storms and clouds…

All the earth

begins to still and slide into rest,

trees quietly shedding as

the air thickens with the coming

of dark

and cold.

Life is telling us to slow…

to put aside busyness and

curl up by the fire with a dog.

Like the trees, storing up energy for spring,

our bodies cannot fight

the natural order of things.

We are merely a dash

on the Great Timeline of the earth’s rotation –

decades

and millinnea

and eons of nature’s demand,

for she knows best.

And so we rest.

It is breaking through -

New grass in a spring pasture

Working to find cracks

    and holes

In which to reach for sunlight.

At times it hurts;

A painful growth of a love that frightens me.

My bones ache with the discovering of it.

And like a tree,

its roots sink deep

into ancient places in my heart

long brushed aside

for places

   more cosmopolitan.

The roots reach down….

    into my gut

    and into my spirit

And the web through the

nucleus of every cell

    of my mind.

How have you caught me,

     Great Beast?

When I am to have caught you?

What magic have you cast?

What spell have you spun?

Your dark eyes speak of instinct and knowledge -

   maybe loyalty,

but also of fear and curiosity.

I feel my heart surrendering to your breath ,

and the heat of your body,

and the innocence of your existence.

Gold begins to overlay

   the cracks and empty spots-

with every velvety nibble on my shoulder.

You’re full of strength and power

But you willingly place yourself

in my hands, trusting…

Inviting me to trust you in return.

~Deborah Linne

I step out of the shower, surrounded by mirrors. Every day, I revisit the stretch marks from pregnancy. Check. The sagging skin from my weight loss. Check. My miniscule chest. Check. I look away.

“I have gone marking the atlas of your body

with crosses of fire…”

I lie bed with a man who looks at me with adoration and desire. I worry about my belly and how it’s not the tight, flat belly he first saw 22 years ago.

“Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,

you look like a world, lying in surrender…”

I glance around the gym and compare my wide hips to the hips of all of the girls around me and convince myself that mine are the largest and least attractive.

“Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,

thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light…” ~Pablo Neruda, various poems

Pablo Neruda has been gently arguing with me over my body shame for a few months now. It began early on a Sunday morning. I had my cup of coffee and a book of poetry, as is my usual ritual. This particular morning, I was hiding under a blanket escaping the brutal cold temperatures that were going on their sixth day. And I was blushing, hotly. My legs felt wobbly and my hips turned to liquid, my cheeks were pink and my chest filled with heat. I realized at that moment that I had a massive crush on a dead poet. In fact, he died just a few months after I was born in the 1970s, an old man with a double chin. And god, I had fallen head over heels in love with him.

Neruda worships me. By me, I mean us – women. He worships us in a way that is carnal and detailed and beautiful and a little rude. His words would make any respectable woman gasp, slap him and then kiss him. Yes, I know I’m talking about a man long dead. Of course I know I couldn’t slap and kiss the man, but I want to slap and kiss the man.

He wrote odes to everything: to apples, to bees, to seagulls, to his suit and to an onion, for god’s sake. They are all filled with beauty and desire and humor. And yet, it is his love poems about the various women in his life for which he is most remembered.

Here’s the thing. He makes me realize the power of my body; teaches me to fall in love and in lust with myself. When I spend time with his words, I walk a little looser. I allow my hips to sway in the way they were built to sway. The imperfections in my belly or my chest would have been the details that made him weak with desire, and so I begin to love them. I feel infinite and infinitely beautiful. I feel at once animal and human.

So much of a modern woman’s life is spent counting and analyzing her flaws. After all, most mass media has a serious investment in keeping us insecure. There is money to be made if we feel terrible about our cellulite, our eye wrinkles and our flabby bellies. There is no end to the cash we can shell out for special diets, creams, and potions that will make us stay younger, firmer or thinner.

I don’t think that Neruda would have approved of this micro-management of our bodies. In fact, I think he would have been quite disgusted with it. He, like most humans, was just pretty darn excited that there was someone naked next to him. He was enraptured by the sensual, earthy fertility and roundness of women.

“A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.

I go so far as to think you own the universe…

I want to do with you

What spring does with the cherry trees.”

You can keep your health, beauty and fitness magazines. I’ll read Neruda. He has convinced me I need nothing more than my own innate power to be sexy. My skin. My hips. My lips. And since he isn’t hanging around to worship me or to kiss me, I’ll kiss someone else – with all the passion and self-love he would have worshipped in me had he known me. And he would have desired the round softness of me. Of this I am certain.

**photo is Picasso’s Mother and Child and Study of Hands