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September 2022
Arlene Levine
arlene@arlenegaylevine.com / www.arlenegaylevine.com
Bio Note: Buddhist master and teacher Jack Kornfield urges us to ask “Am I following a path with heart?” These poems speak to that question, and hopefully, each in its own way reflect the concerns of September’s optional theme, “A Time to Reap.” Most recently, two of my poems are included in a new anthology The Power of the Pause from Wising Up Press. My article entitled “Elusive Beauty” appears in the Summer 2022 issue of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society of America.

I Am a Woman

not in a day but
always, the way 
a cat is also a
kitten until
the day it dies.

When the writing 
on the men’s-room
walls forgets
the female beyond
the forcing and filling
of apertures,
I am a woman.

Spirits smashed
and picked out in
the back of taxi cabs,
bodies to the highest bidder,
femurs spread stirrup fashion
on a cold steel table for insides 
to be read as if the answers to
your questions might be discovered
by an examining room strobe.

I’ve survived the men’s wars 
and the being torn
apart, outside 
and in,
and still wish to make something:
a meeting place where 
we all can dance,
like here, in this poem.
I am a woman
fireproof, seduced
by no one but the
waves and moon.
Originally published in The Dreamer’s Anthology (Beautiful Cadaver Project, Pittsburgh, 2019)

The Garden

On an Autumn day admire
the disarray of a garden grown wild:
once a formal circle of roses
and crew cut grass now gone
long and bushy, a mad man’s mane
spotted with nosegays of wild flowers.
Soldier rows of hedges are invaded
by clematis and crimson ivy, yet
I’ve no heart for taming.
Such unruliness matches my soul,
and so does, on this first frost morning,
one white rose growing
among
the
weeds.
Originally published in ART/LIFE, Volume 13, Number 22 (March, 1993)
©2022 Arlene Levine
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL