Knock on a Hundred Doors
Hello, 2019 and all my friends out there who have knocked on my door today. I greet you from a cozy cabin at Lake Burton, Georgia, on the last day of my holiday vacation. Tomorrow, I go back to work, but I also give my first poetry reading of the year at Cool Beans.
My Teledipity horoscope says this year I should knock on a hundred doors, and I'm going to do it even though I don't yet know which doors or where they will appear except for the door at the wonderful coffee shop upstairs on College Street in Columbia, South Carolina, which somehow became home for this Alabama girl in 2004. The poetry and music event is sponsored by Mind Gravy Poetry.
I turned 53 on December 13. This is the third year of the second half of my life. I hope to see the world with new eyes again, be as curious as a kitten, and occasionally extend my claws and growl and hiss a bit. Sometimes it will be dark, but the curious go into the dark and see what's hiding, don't they? Here's a poem I wrote a few years ago that relates:
Darkest Night in Five Hundred Years
“The starling, that the counsaile can bewrie” (Geoffrey Chaucer)
This winter solstice, black board of naught
unlit by fire-stars or hurried yearnings,
still, undisturbed as a nest of starlings
hidden in its cavity.
The yellow sun must wait for its hour
to strike in this hush, deep netherworld of finite
fashion, the sky dressed as a mourner
at the funeral of a friend, heart scratched
with sadness, forlorn.
We all wait, the world awake in wee
hours, staring hard at the blue-black
worsted space that hides the lost
friend’s face as if behind a windswept
umbrella,
and we walk in this night rain toward
each other, sightless as kittens,
cheeks wet with hope and wonder,
as if we’d just been born.
Here we go, friends. I'll write again soon.