. .
[with 3 poems by Terri Kirby Erickson]
.
Heaven
.
You wake in a sun drenched room
with knotty pine walls and open windows,
.
white curtains billowing. The warm,
salt-scented breeze carries
.
the sound of waves, the laughter of children,
the cry of gulls. Somewhere
.
inside the house, bacon sizzles in a pan,
coffee drips into a pot – and there are voices,
.
familiar voices – your grandmother,
your brother, your best friend. It’s been
.
so long since you have seen them.
So you sit up in bed, stretch your strong,
.
supple limbs. There is no pain,
no stiff shoulders and creaky joints.
.
There is no weight of sorrow or regret –
only a kind of soaring joy that lifts
.
and circles inside you like a kit.
And when you move across the floor,
.
it feels like floating, as if your body is made
of light and air – but solid when
.
they reach for you, when their arms
open wide and you walk in.
.
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
.
❦ ❦ ❦
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Spontaneous combustion – when a ten-year old reads about such a thing of course he’s going to think, Fire! Cool! My friends and I weren’t allowed to play with matches (although we could have swiped some from our Dads, all smokers, and we certainly smoldered plenty of stuff with our magnifying glasses during the Memphis summers). So fire blossoming up all on its own?! We scrounged an old t-shirt, sopped up some oil that had leaked from a lawn mower, and stashed the rags in a dark corner of Mike Slattery’s garage. And waited. I moved away from that neighborhood two years later and I have yet to hear that the garage burned down.
.
I have a friend with a gift. She can wake up in the morning first thing and fire off to the rest of us in the writers group what has just flowed from her pen into her journal. “Can” as in willing and able and unrestrained. Ten lines or twenty, she shares something always fresh, light breaking, a window open to her soul. Meanwhile, I’ve re-written this paragraph three times in my head, twice on paper, and six times on the screen. I need the t-shirt my brother-in-law Skip wears: “Hold on a minute while I overthink this.”
.
Now I’m stashing stuff in the car for this morning’s drive to Winston, errands to be accomplished for Dad: laptop, check; Power of Attorney docs, check. Wait, I was thinking of taking Dad some flowers from the front yard today. No, too tired. Next time.
.
And when might that next time arrive? Snipping zinnias, marigolds, anise hyssop, coaxing their stems into an old bread bag with a wet paper towel in the bottom, fitting the fresh bouquet into my cup holder – oh, my! Flames of purple and scarlet and bright orange, scent of mint and musky asters – pulling out of the driveway, how spontaneously I combust!
. 
.
❦ ❦ ❦
.
Sunflowers
.
In our well-manicured yard
where a clover can’t show its face
or risk dire consequences, a row
of sunflowers sprang up by the bird
feeder, claiming the kitchen
.
window for their own. Such thick
stalks and heavy flowers belong
in children’s stories, where
gardens bloom in shapes
and colors seldom imagined
.
and mushroom grow as big
as houses. With great dark eyes
surrounded by yellow lashes,
they follow the sun on its daily
journey – a bevy of bold young
.
girls in love with the same boy.
Dazzling beauties all, showing
up our prim blades of grass
and trimmed bushes like hula
dancers in a room full of pilgrims.
.
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
.
❦ ❦ ❦
.
clouds cast shadows across the ground like whales swimming through clear water
a bevy of bold young girls in love with the same boy [sunflowers]
the yellow-haired girl whose hands rested in her lap like fresh-picked lilies
her fingers dancing over tubes of lipstick as if they were piano keys, and she, learning a new song
.
Terri Kirby Erickson’s poems delight in the perfect image, the lance of daylight that makes shadows radiant. She populates her lines with characters from every neighborhood and every family, her own included, and she reveals their secrets, unknown sometimes even to them, but she does it with language so airy and effortless that I imagine her raising her pen like a lightning rod and drawing to it from heaven a bright spark of inspiration. Spontaneous, emerging fully formed from the heart. The rest of us bail the bilge as we adhere to the adage, “Writing is re-writing,” while Terri is skipping stones across the water.
.
❦
.
In the Palms of Angels by Terri Kirby Erickson is available at PRESS 53
More by Terri at Verse & Image HERE
.
.
❦ ❦ ❦
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Grandmother’s Lamp
.
In the quiet stillness of a snowy evening,
the earth is white as angel wings and the sky
purple as lilacs pressed against the window
.
pane. The soft glow of Grandmother’s lamp,
with its yellowed shade and pattern
of porcelain roses, falls on the antique tabletop
.
and the picture of my mother, the ballet
dancer, posing. From the street,
it’s just another lamp in a long row of lighted
.
windows, but to me, it is the sweet comfort
of my grandmother’s face, bent earnestly
over her needle point, or patiently putting together
.
another scrapbook of memories, pasted just so
on the page. It is her quiet certainty that this, too,
shall pass, that God hears our prayers,
.
and the heaven is not the stuff of fairy tales
woven to quiet our fears, but as real as the lamp
she left for me, to light my way there.
.
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
.
❦ ❦ ❦
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