Sonnet for Mo (with a little help from Shakespeare’s #116)
Let me not, a mother of one newborn,
Make bold assumptions. But love is not love
That leaves when a baby leaves the womb nor
Does memory of loss so soon resolve.
Oh no, love is a forever birthmark
Tattooed on a heart and never uninked
No matter how far the child’s wandering arc
Stretches from the body, the two are linked.
Love is no one’s slave, though green eyes and brown skin
Adopt a solo diaspora,
Love plows deep every country you are in
And grows up into most fertile flora.
Though this poem alone cannot stamp your worth
Mother love bloomed the moment of your birth.
-©Nancy Slavin, 2020
Sestina for Monday, April 13, 2020
Today is rough: a nurse furloughed from work
Who was midwife to each newborn life,
Who bore witness one day more to each first breath.
A committee now forms in order to stress
The West’s resilient economy. Surely, they pray
Near all those mass graves of the unknown dead.
Spring has sprung! The threat is almost dead,
under blue skies and sunshine. Time to get to work
like a slave for the common good. Birds of prey
in this intelligent age of the privileged and simple life,
A capital that knows nothing of acute, ongoing stress.
I can’t breathe, my brother can’t breathe, we have no breath.
On this day of petroleum-fueled fumes of breath,
Many more lost at home—the non-exposed, walking dead—
Why are we here? Such chaotic distress,
Our fall into nothingness. The invention of work,
Abstraction from the wilderness, is a mad grab for life
Made real by rare metal and pressed glass. Let us pray
In order to believe we exist. We have existed. I said, Let us pray.
Language cannot capture this moment; the signified is vapored breath.
No words convey how a hospital worker day after day saw life
Expire every shift, who held a patient’s hand, soon declared dead,
and a screen up to the spouse, mother, father, child’s face. What work
Force could ever compensate that amount of stress?
The press brief allures, spread legs of a young mistress,
Absolve us of our sins, oh heavenly virgin to whom we pray.
Is there a way to earn billions without a honest day’s work,
While tricking out the bunker rather than halting the breadth
Of this predictable pandemic’s steep uptick of dead?
Our lives are a wasteland if we consent to the wasting of life.
So, may we examine our one wild and precious life.
May we focus on opening our sacred hearts. May we pray
To dismantle these old, pale systems, mortared walls that never worked.
Every life is created equal from the very first wailing breath.
We have a choice whether we choose to forsake the dead.
May we rise up and co-create an arc that gives us life,
A life of community on earth more than a symbol to which we pray.
Some must shoulder more stress to grace others more breath.
This time of our history is dead serious. Let us get to work.
-©Nancy Slavin, 2020
Oregon Pacific is a compilation of pieces from two limited-edition chapbooks, The Nature of Gratitude (2002) and Public Access (2004), and a never-released Part 3 called Long Winter. These poems were all written during twenty-plus years of living and loving on the north Oregon coast. Thank you for your support by buying to this collection, a true labor of love.
From the back bookjacket: Oregon Pacific is a book of poems grounded in the dynamic experience of living on the North Oregon coast, replete with storms, salmon, and the search for serenity that often accompanies living near the ocean. While most of the poems are linked via the coastal environment, the larger theme of the collection is reconciliation between our often suppressed feminine, natural, and peace-loving qualities with our more dominant masculine, material and war-faring values. The collection utilizes a variety of traditional forms, including sonnet, sestina, ode, haiku, and villanelle, as well as free verse and loose iambic pentameter. The voices of all the poems aim to be contemporary and accessible, focusing on concrete objects and sensory images to convey ideas.
Oregon Pacific – currently sold out. Last remaining copies may still be at Cloud & Leaf Bookstore in Manzanita, Oregon.
Here’s the link to A Day in the Life of an Indie Poet
Older version of poems for your enjoyment: