The Return
The highway finds me broken
and broken free from the mountain’s grip
bleeding from a fight with the clinging trees
Distance restarts my heart
Each mile is another beat
At the edge of the ocean
my breath and my dreams
return to me
No Kings
They came at night
and hollowed out the trees
then told us what our damaged forest needed
Messages broadcast through empty shells masquerading as
the heart of the land
polluted the water and some minds
But the wind, she collected
the outrage
the broken dreams
and the agony of every being
that the hollow shell of the wannabe king
tried to silence
The wind screamed
“We will not bow to kings”
Each of us a became a raindrop in the storm that tore down
the emperor’s gold-plated castle
I’m thrilled to have The Wind is the Only Thing (a collection of four poems) featured in the anthology, The Heart of Us. This anthology is a collection of poems and stories by women and mothers about the joys, pain, and revelations of love. To love takes strength and courage, and the journey makes us who we are.
Image description – image is a pale pink graphic. On the right is the book cover for The Heart of Us. It features the outline of a woman’s face. Her hair is created by love-related words and a rose graphic. On the left side are the words “as women, mothers, and storytellers, we live from the heart, and it shows in every word we share. These pages hold our joy and our sorrow, our victories and defeats, our laughter and our tears. Each piece is a reflection of what it means to live, feel, and grow with heart. This is the heart of us.”
The Heart of Us- a moms who write anthology is available on Amazon and all proceeds go to the American Heart Association.
https://www.amazon.com/heart-us-moms-who-write-ebook/dp/B0FCBT8SQ7
Song Behind the Trees
Beyond the tree line
music beckons
Keep reading for the two possible endings to this poem
Ending 1 –
Past the threshold
no trail awaits
The stars can’t breach the canopy of leaves
A chorus of vines wrap around me
I’m a present for everything that stings
Venom lessons leach into blood, muscle, and bone,
Wolves wait and rabbits
scream
Over the crickets’ wicked laugh
I hear the stream
whispering
that the forest doesn’t go on forever
The music is gone
so I write my own
Ending 2-
When I cross the threshold
leaves swallow me, doing their best to hide me
from things that steal and sting
Whisper of the stream
guides me
off the path
through briars that cut into my leaves
piercing muscle, clawing at hope
but the sound still calls
I hide from spiders and walk with snakes
through the rain
over places where the earth
split
Stars and fireflies stay true
And the night’s butterfly takes me through the last miles
to the heart
the symphony
the beginning
of everything
Image description – a photo of somewhat barren trees at the edge of a forest. The sky is overcast, and a layer of fog gives the trees a hazy appearance.
Why two endings for the poem?
After I wrote the beginning of the poem, I started thinking of two possible endings- one more sinister and one with a more joyous outcome. I remembered reading those Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was a kid and thought, why not have two endings to this poem?
A song, a promise, a path- hidden except for the first few steps- could be a trap, waiting to ensnare any who dare to enter. Will the price to move past the trees be cuts so deep that souls and bones need to be pulled back together with a needle and thread? Or is the hint of the hauntingly beautiful song a prelude to something wonderful?
The threads binding our souls and bones remember the agony of past lessons, yet the stitches come alive with curiosity. In stillness we dissolve. Beyond the tree line, we find reasons.
The Electric Doors Never Stop Eating
Earlier than necessary
electric doors open wide
ushering in employees who either
drank the corporate-issued devotion-to-policy brew
or chose a regular cup of coffee and steeled themselves to slog through
another day of being under the eye and thumb of
cameras and software packages designed to report
each word
each keystroke
to measure productivity, to predict loyalty
to the almighty company
Corporate mission statements decorate walls and computer screens
Remember:
Positive attitudes only
Daily emails politely warn
that questions come with a penalty
When bodies drop under the weight of unattainable goals
and crack like stones
No blood left to squeeze
The boss with the broom sweeps the old dust out
so the doors can welcome in
younger faces ready to bleed for a company
that will demand the impossible
then sweep away the broken pieces
with a broom
Image description – photograph of high-rise businesses overlooking a rocky section of the James River
About the poem:
As rights for workers and conditions for workplace safety continue to erode, the reality hits hard that lawmakers are not coming to help workers. Nobody in politics is coming to provide actually legislative help because their pockets are being lined for staying silent. Since nobody in power is coming to help, it’s up to us to set a precedent, to draw lines, to set limits, and to be loud and obnoxious when we can if subtle strategies and quiet subterfuge fails. Otherwise, the spineless, manipulative, ass-kissers who have sold their souls for the privilege of serving their corporate overlords will continue to perpetrate wage theft, require unattainable goals, tout unrealistic expectations, discriminate both overtly and covertly, and cause unsafe and/or inhumane working conditions.
Life in a Bottle
Plastic bottles inhale
breath from the river
Corporations sell
life
and take it
without regret
Image description – A photograph of a narrow, winding section of the James River surrounded by trees on a sunny, spring afternoon
About the poem – Corporations have been given the rights (for the right price, paid to hungry politicians) to bottle up water from waterbodies that people depend on, both in the United States and in other countries. These soulless corporations then sell the bottled water to the people whose streams and rivers the corporations have claimed. There are so many short-term profit tactics that involve destroying water and land for temporary gain. Politicians who allow the land to be polluted and destroyed are often working under the assumption that the aftereffects won’t catch up to them in their lifetime. They assume that they will always live in the protected, fortunate areas where such things don’t occur.
The earth can’t protect itself from shareholders and CEOs or from smiling lawmakers bent on getting kickbacks for passing along environmental destruction laws, all so they can send their kids to the good schools and have summer homes by the river (in the sections the corporations can’t touch, of course), so we have to respect and protect the earth.
Earth Day is a chance to remember and appreciate all the beautiful parks and natural landmarks, but it’s also a reminder that we need to be active in the fight to preserve them.
Audience Participation
The billionaire showman
of the carnival his father bought
forces us into a ring where we fight for scraps
and betray our friends for the chance
to survive another night in the land of horrors
The showman gives us piles of bones for bedding
We eat the tendons and scraps for breakfast
until the bone shards in our bellies
hemorrhage
slowly and surely
The affluent audience laughs
at the display of our desperation
because they don’t realize that they’ve become
part of the show
Wreck the Monoliths
Corporations eat a steady diet
of wage theft
and rise as monoliths
crushing homes and hopes in their wake
The stone slabs grow steel cables
Tentacles
meant to choke us into desperation
The monoliths tell us to be good little worker bees
and carry the weight of their excess
But when the prospect of spending a lifetime
ensnared
becomes too much to endure
a whisper drifts
through the stifling atmosphere
rolling into a thundering shout
until all of the bees
decide to do nothing
forcing stone walls to crumble into ash
and we all agree
to never build our prisons again
Image Description: a photograph of two large yellow sunflowers. A yellow and black butterfly sits on one of the sunflowers.
Life has been weird and uncertain lately. I’m fearful that the US will regress permanently and women and minorities have drastically reduced rights. It’s strange that my kids are growing up in a time where they already have fewer rights than I had as a teenager. I grew up in the 1990s, during the time where music festivals and ragged flannel shirts were plentiful. The rebellion against the status quo was rippling out from obscure punk bands and becoming prevalent in more mainstream music, across several genres. The trend of pushing boundaries rather than adhering to them was seen in the types of television, movies, books, and magazines gaining in popularity.
Books and music were an inspiration, a way to begin difficult conversations and gauge other people’s openness to the way our little part of the world was moving forward. I had always loved reading, and around the time I hit the high school, the library down the street from home expanded it’s offerings considerably. I found a plethora of books authored by women. In these stories, the female characters, whether they were heroines or side characters, were portrayed with actual depth rather than being shown as one-dimensional plot devices that propped up the male characters. I loved that these stories were written in a way where a woman’s curiosity and imperfections were not used as morality devices intended to instill fear and shut down questions. Sadly, the time has come again where books that pose such important questions are being frequently hidden from the people who seek answers.
There have always been book bans. Political leaders and ultra conservatives don’t want us questioning the laws and rules we’re expected to live under. They don’t want us to be able to find the right words to prove that they’re trying to create a society that benefits only them. Any version of history other than the sanitized, colonized words of writers who couldn’t begin to understand how much empathy they lacked, is being removed from the shelves and tossed in the proverbial fire, once again.
Some states now require parents to accompany their children, even kids old enough to drive and take SATs, through the library and authorize all books checked out. Imagine the information that will be lost, the staggering amount of opportunities for learning and progressing forward that will be crushed because information is being hidden with foolish fervor.
I miss the innocence of thinking progress and rights that had been fought for and won before and during my childhood would be guaranteed in perpetuity. I miss the security of thinking things would continuously improve for people who had often been denied opportunities in the past. While advancements in medicine and technology had been phenomenal, humanity’s capacity to lift each other up and care for one another does not seem to have evolved.
During the past thirty years, I have completed a master’s degree, raised two children, changed careers to become a writer, and dealt with various health issues that gave me a glimpse at my own mortality. In all that time, my country has become increasingly bigoted and intolerant, and those perpetrating such ignorance have been noticeably more empowered by political leaders to speak out and enact laws that openly discriminate.
Power hungry billionaires and CEOs want more wage serfs to serve their purposes. In time, it won’t just be poor people, people of color, or women whose lives and chances for prosperity become drastically limited. After a while, the billionaire class will come for everyone but their own, even the millionaires. The line of inequality will continue moving and if we don’t scream about things and disrupt the process now, there may be no way out of the path of becoming human ants who have no time to do anything except work brutal hours before falling into an exhausted sleep, yet still barely make enough to survive.
I don’t know what will happen in the next few years or decades, but I can’t just sigh and accept the inevitability of living in a sad, subservient future. I will continue to write stories and poetry that shows truths and possibilities, I will make phone calls and show up in protest lines, I will ask questions, and I will find as many ways as possible to resist.
Origins of a Ghost Story
Uranium invades harmony
Fish can’t out swim toxicity
Corporate goals achieved
Image description – photograph of a desolate dirt road beneath a foggy sky.
This is my first attempt at a lune poem (three words/five words/three words version). Origins of a Ghost Story was inspired by the ever-present problem of corporations and real estate developers overtaking a terrifying amount of natural land. The consequences are devastating to the environment but not to the corporate entities and shareholders who bring about the destruction. They have no reason or requirement to care about what they’ve done, so the damage continues. Ghost towns and over-priced, treeless suburban mega sites packed with chain restaurants and phone stores are often the result of these development projects.
The land doesn’t have a voice, so when I write fiction, I try to create characters who take care of nature and see it as a necessary part of life and soul, rather than a resource to be developed into oblivion. In my poetry, I often write about the harmony of humanity and nature, and the capacity for greed to disrupt what could be a peaceful coexistence.
Melting
Sun shines on the dance floor
melting away ice masks of
winter’s masquerade
Image description – The sun is shining on a partially frozen section of the James River. Sections of ice are thick in outer areas and broken and thin towards the middle.
I have to keep reminding myself that there’s always a light shining. Even when the sun sinks into the sky, the moon will still rise, and when clouds block her brilliance, there are still lighthouses on distant shores. And if we can hold out a little while longer, we’ll see the sparks of fireflies that risk their lives to light the night with the hope and truths that fuel our reason.
Christina Lynn Lambert 