Hello and Welcome!

Here in the Mid-Atlantic, we have the chance of snow every day for a week. That’s pretty unusual. And I’m delighted. I’ve always loved snow — one form of water — for its ability to magically transform our familiar landscapes as well as cancel school and sometimes work. At least for a while, everything looks beautifully clean, and I can (briefly) indulge the fantasy of everyone snuggled comfortably in their warm homes.

More recently I’ve wondered how homeless people deal with snow and extreme temperatures as well as those for whom snow is a burden or impediment to their normal and necessary activities. My cozy-snow-nostalgia does not apply to their lives.

It’s an uncomfortable realization.

Recent poems, many of them in questions for water, and the title poem itself, focus directly on issues of inequity and poverty. The poems reflect injustices that I’ve witnessed or experienced in Baltimore. (Yes, good things also happen in Baltimore.) The first step toward actively creating a just society is looking into that terribly uncomfortable mirror.

Here are three poems. While the speaker in each could be described as privileged, the speaker in the third shows someone else’s less privileged and painful reality. Through showing very real pain of very real people, I hope readers will be moved to recognize the trauma that is living in poverty and act in ways that will reduce suffering. That might be keeping snacks and water bottles in your car to give away, or giving a dollar or ten or twenty to a person or helping organization when you can, or helping elect those dedicated to reducing human suffering, or volunteering in your community. Sometimes it’s as simple as looking someone in the eyes and treating them with kindness.

I’m not suggesting that every poem I write in the future will or should include more than my own socio-economic viewpoint, but I do want to be open to the perspectives of others whom some parts of society would like to pretend don’t exist.

If you like, jump over to the Contact page and share your thoughts. Until next time–

Virginia

i wish for blizzards

every winter i wish
for blizzards  like our first
year when we watched
the snowflakes fall in the silver
night until the world became
so beautiful i could not look
now we watch from the window
or the opened door
the snowflakes sparkle in the street 
lights each one falling tenderly upon the next
and i am glad when
they are piled so high
there is nowhere else to go


along the road

driving through an early winter night
maybe the first night you see your own breath
trees hang over the road
headlights smack their naked branches
leaves swish in the street
passing houses  light thrown softly
through their rooms  i see the family
all their faces glowing

or it’s a house with just one person
absorbed in a novel
maybe it’s about trains
or characters who are always
starting new lives or new religions
behind the steam of another cup of coffee
ah  the geography of new love

this is what i want to do in the cold
i want to eat the whole pie 
and have no one scold me
i want to perfect human hibernation
the way people in blizzards
become their own factories
whirling synchronized belts
running smoothly through their houses
i want to dance down from trees
be swept away with wind
into a house on a road
its light several rooms deep 


baltimore

he approaches my car
stopped at a red light
it’s winter
his hands bare
red  cracked  swollen
might bleed at any moment

i place an orange
in his destroyed hand
then  wishing him luck  
as i do each time
i look up

he’s young 
hard to tell beneath
his experience
his tears

this young man
stands
in the road
holding an orange
crying

he says between sobs
hot food
i only want 
hot food