Redemption’s Beautiful, Remember

March 9, 2014March 11, 2014 ~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 5 Comments

Redemption’s Beautiful, Remember

I wonder what the years will do to today
Take it and shrink it
Shred it and fade it, peel it, tone it down
Today can never be brighter or more glorious
Than she is in her now
The slow fade comes in the looking back
Over shoulders and in glass, in memoir
And in remembering
Reflecting, recalling
Reaching back into archives of the mind and of memory

So I will hold today up to the light and make it
Tell the truth to me
Beg it to be generous in its gifting of itself to me
Beg it to show me details wrought in sharp hues
And bright shades of this moment
Desperate for every ounce of pleasure I can squeeze
From it, from sunup to down
Draining it of all joy and grace
A woman starved for beauty
As if the sun would never shine again
As if it hasn’t in a decade now

The dark and dormant winter
Has been asked to retire
And we usher in, on a red carpet, rolled out
For the now and today
Fit for Kings and stars and starlets

The belle of the ball
She is today, dressed in her finery
Her seconds of fame and glory
Ticking away as she spins and spends
Herself

And I
Recording
Knowing that the clearest
She will ever be
Is before me now
Tomorrow and the day after
Bring me a dimmer version
Missing pieces
Forgotten parts
Losing memory of herself
Losing detail and sharp lines
Blurring the focus of what it is
As it becomes what it never was

And I may not even remember
Today
Tomorrow
Oh the pain of a fading
Past
The currency of the current
Spend it wisely
Record it as a wise man would
Regret robs today, regret robs tomorrow
Regret stole some of yesterday
I wonder what the years will do to today
Redemption revises
Restores
And today is beautiful again.

Joining Deidra and Sandy and Laura

Memory Is A Lady

March 4, 2014March 4, 2014 ~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 1 Comment

Memory Is A Lady

She is a traitor
Rub the slender bottled neck
With the waist of a teenage girl
And pray she pops out like a genie
Powerful, potent, able to grant wishes
Instant and endless
In three’s
Memories

She is a hoarder
Holding on haughty and hard
To the ones you try desperately to find, to grasp
Was it one kiss or two
Nine months or three
Stingy and stubborn, relentless is she
White-knuckling scraps of time
Scenes from the movie reel of you
And of me
At her mercy
Mercifully begging for more
But she hoards
Memories

She is a temptress
Releasing parts, never wholes
Holding on greedily to finite detail
Showing fuzzy black and white reruns
When you crave HD, 3-D
Accurate truth
Memories whole, not halved
It is your life and you
Demand it back
From the shallow grave
Buried and hidden
Hungry you cry out
Longing for more
Memories

But she is protector and guard she must.

She is creative, witty and wise
She shades the blue teal that you thought grey
You swore it was azure, she insists it was slate
Erases and deletes
That year in New York you were swallowed up
In pain, by fear
Give her permission
She has taken it
Anyway
She decides what to include
And what to completely
Leave out
Then out of the blue
She shows you a scene
A day in the life
You’d dropped like a dime on the street

The timing is perfect
Like a fig picked from the tree
Ready to savor with honey
And goat cheese
Like loaves and fishes are multiplied
So does she
Find the best days and parts
To amplify, embellish and increase
And release
Memory of you
And of me

She is a lady holding the keys
To the life, the story, the telling again and again

The story of me
Not exact, not perfectly remembered
But just
As she has determined
It should be
She is a lady
Gentle and kind
Not cruel

I must tell myself
Again and again
Lost in my own
Memories
Fading
And dim

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Joining Laura and Michelle

Remembering Pink Among The January Blues

January 23, 2014 ~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 2 Comments

Remembering Pink Among The January Blues

Cold crawls down my throat
And freezes deep
Among two winter-laced lungs
Hope frozen but for
A moment
Thawed by the chambers
Of a rapid beating
Heart, pumping, forcing
Red, shaded crimson
Rises to my cheeks
And to my nose
And colors
Pink the tip

And I
I purse my lip
Just like the winter
Bloom

And I am
Slowly
Thawed, outside and in
By warm remembering

Of faded valentines
Bows
Posted on the mailbox
Declaring that a daughter has been
Born
Of salmon rushing up stream
Against all odds
And flannel p.j.’s worn
In college
Days of shades of
Pink

And every year she comes
When hope is all but lost
She pushes through the cold
And frost
And hangs a hundred blooms
Whispering that Spring
Will come, it always does

And thaws the coldest soul
Stuck in the middle of
A million signs of
January
And her deepest
Shades of blues

Gazing At The Ordinary Marvelous

October 21, 2013 ~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 4 Comments

Today is Day Poetic

Have you noticed a little quiet pause. Is it bending or breaking the 31 Days “code of writing to triple up” one post to cover three days in the series. Ah, I have been living and traveling and noticing. And thinking of this place and space while it was quiet. Were you out noticing while it was quiet? Have you even noticed that I was gone?

Today is Day 21 ( and 20 and 19)

Gazing at The Ordinary Marvelous

I have wondered through a maze of noticing
Sat on every word unfurled from preacher’s lips
Not mine, on prayer, unending
Every note, black, ballet dancer up and down
That old red hymnal, still smells like memories of Methodist
Smells a certain way
Doxology dances off the yellow pages, runs rifts
Of remembering ordinary marvelous
Weaves a red thread through the years and days

And I have wandered through a maze of bittersweet
Returning with my fragile heart and mind
I long to change a memory
Bur, for all my trying I can’t rewrite it
Into something better, brighter, sweeter
Babys at the alter, dipped in sacred fonts
Will stir the waters that run deep
Inside a mother’s broken heart

I have wondered through the winding
Roads that lead me home to Woodland Heights
Where I am met with fond recalling
Early morning, late at night
Bookended by the generations
Stories that go on and on, echoing down the mountain
There are no secrets anymore
Rolling tires crunch crush the brittle leaves
A slow and gentle breaking
On this road to my returning
I have come back home again, met by autumn’s gold dust shining
She opens wide the door for me.

Everything is ordinary
Marvelous as it should be
Concentric circles of recalling
Spokes that find their way back to the center
Tines which gently poke inside, time and time again
Urge me to recall while listening to the echo of
The winsome valley train

Everything is marvelous
The circles spin like hands clockwise round the rounded clock
Face the moments, ordinary
Savor all the pieces of the past
Colliding with the present
All this noticing
Never seems to stop
For if it did and if it were
If the door to my eyes and memory
Were to close and come to final rest
Death would meet me at the end of marvelous
Where all the ordinary settles into peacefulness

While time presents herself
At daybreak, new and wondrous once again
I go forth to gather
All the ordinary marvelous
Where we sing loud and joyful
A searcher’s song, a hymn of praise
Let Noticing her loud and lively anthem raise.

(To read all posts in this 31 day series, The Art of Noticing, click here to land on Day One and a listing of all posts) I am joinging The Nester at The Nester dot com for October. Click here to check out some of the other writers/bloggers who are accepting this writing challenge. There are some wonderful writers participating in several cool categories.

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Joining Laura Boggess at Laura Boggess dot com . It is where I go on Mondays for a writer’s Playdate.

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