Final Poem to Close National Poetry Month

Ladies and gentlemen, I've had fun sharing poems with you for the past month. I will continue to do so as the year progresses and we slip into the next National Poetry Month.

I leave you with this poem, one I wrote a few years ago. One of my favorite singing duos is Lowen and Navarro, to whom my buddy Rob introduced me a few years ago. I always write poetry at their concerts.

"If I Was the Rain," written by Eric Lowen, has a wonderful verse:

I'd strike a chord within each each heart
wherever they were torn apart —
and if that helped them heal themselves
maybe we'd find out where forgiveness starts.

Wow, where does forgiveness start? I wondered. Many of my poem's images came pretty quickly. I have to say, I like this poem, and I thank Eric and Dan for their creativity.

I've also been inspired by their songs "Maybe Later" and "If You Loved Me Like That," and one of these days I'll share those poems with you.

In the meantime, my fellow poets who contributed bathroom and daffodil poems should keep their eyes on their mailboxes. The rest of you should keep reading poems.

And if someone knows how to edit in indents on this blog, let me know. The first lines of the second and third stanzas should be further right, but darned if I know how!


Where forgiveness starts

Here at the end of the road, where
sharp, dying brown needles from
ancient pine trees block the moonlight,
the blackened remains of the cabin
rests on its haunches, like a cat.
The floorboards that once
hid under my bed are crumbling
planks, dissolving to dust
in my hands, that still
cover the dented, rusting silver
tin sequestering my journal,
its pages blistered by my shame.

My body remembers

the path to the lake, head ducks low under
limbs of scorched, barren cherry
trees, feet tread over decrepit termite-
ridden asp, skim across sticky leaves
then meet the sharp gravel along
shore, where the waves lap delicately,
as though a creature has
langurously glided past just
below the glassy surface reflecting
the quarter moon dappled by
cirrus clouds.


I dive
to the tangle of roots where it was once
safe and wedge the tin securely in
the velvety ooze. Lacing my fingers through
the veins of ancient silver maple,
I finally feel the shocking ice
water wash away your fingerprints.
The obsidian water and the deafening
silence wrap me like swaddling
cloths, and yet they cannot
bind the one who has come
to let go. I float to the surface,
forgiving myself, the last person
against whom I still hold a grudge.

by Chris Fow