Poems by Grace Cavalieri
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In the Meadow
by Grace Cavalieri
Grace lives and writes in Annapolis, Maryland, by the beautiful Chesapeake Bay, which is coming back to life with new fish, new hope, new streams.
Upon the half imagined branch, clouds seeping in wait
spirits slip like rain toward imagination, its center,
fruit falls from drifting light bewitched to sound, breath
of tiny gales unfurled, music is in the meadow harvesting
mercies. Information from the heart transforms to words,
weave them to garlands like tides their distance, surviving
the sun, in the meadow, a stream from silence, a field
of blue flowers, a chill of change.
© Grace Cavalieri
Letter
by Grace Cavalieri
If you ask what brings us here,
staring out of our lives
like animals in high grass,
I’d say it was what we had in common
with each other – the hum of a song we
believe in which can’t be heard,
the sound of our own
luminous bodies rising just behind that hill,
the dream of a light which won’t go out,
and a story we’re never finished with.
We talk of things we never comprehend
so that you’ll know about
the inner and the outer world which are the same.
Someone has to be with us in this,
and if you are, then,
you know us best. And I mean all of us,
the deer who leaves his marks behind him
in the leaves, the red fox moving through the woods.
The same stream in them is in us too
although we are the chosen ones who speak.
Please tell me what you think cannot be sold
and I will say that’s all there is:
the pain in our lives.
… the love we have …
we bring you these small seeds.
Do what you can with them.
What is found in this beleaguered
and beautiful land is what we write.
from Poems New & Selected (Vision Library)
© Grace Cavalieri
Tiny Ants without Sorrow
by Grace Cavalieri
From Canary Spring 2013
A string of tiny mites ,
thematic elements of nature,
climb the beach house wall.
What vibration causes them to stop, confer
with another line, then move on, we’ll never know.
Over and over like a prayer, they go.
These infinitesimal creatures, moving in unison, reach
another set of beings, freeze, then begin again.
Protean intelligence with an elegant sense of balance,
—with sensibility unfailingly sure of its path—
They do not have wounds too deep for anger.
They do not need to elevate the struggle.
© Grace Cavalieri
Walking the Property (4 parts)
by Grace Cavalieri
From Canary February/March 2009
I don’t know
what to say
about music
when I hear
the bluebird
crack grief
out of sound
like this.
**
The rain is not mine and it is not yours.
I walk in the woods as if the soul
could work here
but first I must give up even this leaf
as if it belonged to me
and also the wind
which once knew me
or sounded like it did.
Where do things go when we forget them –
That’s where we go too
following our names.
**
Smart spider, building a web
by the blue bug-light,
attracting his fair share
of what flies there.
**
The cows know when to come home at dinner time.
They always come home.
First published in Fieralinque
© Grace Cavalieri