Part of the joy of writing poetry is learning from those who read it what meaning they take from a poem. To a degree, my experience at writing poetry is not so much actively composing the poem, but is more a matter of copying down the phrases that appear fully formed in my mind. The words and tempo seem to flow on their own and I often feel like a passive observer of the process--someone who is fortunate enough to be present to write the words on paper. And, yes, I usually write things on paper first. That is because many of the words come while I'm about to fall asleep at night or when I awaken during the night or in the morning with them running through my head and in need of being written down. Or, they may come as I'm driving or engaged in some automatic physical activity that lets my mind wander somewhat freely. I keep pads and pens near my bed and in my car for that purpose. Because the process is somewhat preconscious, I am often surprised at what emerges. Also, on reading the words days later, I often find that there are multiple possible meanings to the poems that have emerged.
In general, I'm happy to accept that any given poem means what the reader finds it means to them. Poems evoke feelings, and to me, that is a primary purpose for writing them. To my mind, the feelings evoked are often more important than a particular image or story. Poetry is often intentionally opaque. Its purpose is to evoke thought and reflection rather than to convey information, although it does sometimes inform the reader about particular facts or events. Even the most detailed epic poetry is not written for its historic accuracy. It is written to stir the hearts and minds of the readers and to excite their imaginations. It attempts to engage readers at both the intellectual and emotional levels, and to do this through a fairly precise and sparing use of words. Readers are expected to "read between the lines" to capture the multiple possible meanings. They are also led into a process of occupying the left, "thinking," part of their brains with decoding the intellectual content of the poem so that the right, "feeling," part of their brains can experience the emotions that are being evoked.
Although I hope that anybody reading the poems in this small book will find meaning for themselves in each of the poems, I have decided, at the urging of a friend who has been the only person to read these poems soon after I have written them, to include notes about what I was thinking and feeling as I wrote them and as I reflected on them when compiling them for this publication. I must stress that these notes are only my own reflections on the poems. They are not meant to be the only way to view the poems. In some cases, your own observations may be like mine, but they may also be quite different. What the poems truly mean is what they mean to you as the reader.
What follows are the author's comments on each poem, beginning with the first poem in the Estella Jane Cycle in Do Trees Wear Watches.
ESTELLA JANE CYCLE
The poems in this section are about my relationship with my wife of nearly 44 years. During the year after her death, I had many memories of her and of our life together. I never tried to make memories come, but depended on my unconscious mind to let the thoughts and feelings emerge when the time was right for them to come. After I began to write haiku again, many of these thoughts and feelings began to fall naturally into that simple, poetic form. Each has a strong emotional component for me and each grew out of the connection we had with one another.
Winter in my heart
Grey skies bringing ice and snow
Warm sun in the east
This was the very first poem I wrote during this time and is probably one of the few that maintains the classic haiku form. I wrote it four months after my wife's death. It is a poem of hope and change. The notion is of a new, brighter day about to dawn and of a turn toward spring and renewal.
The joy of her smile
She looks at a worn picture
Could it be of me?
I was in awe that my wife had chosen me to be with. I never doubted her love because I could see the love in her face. In a sense, I was imagining that I was the one to die first. I could visualize her looking through the family pictures and smiling.
Deep within her warmth
I find myself wanting more
Morning comes too soon
This describes the times we would be so content just to lie in bed and cuddle rather than get up to face the day. At those times it was hard to distinguish ourselves as individuals and we had no particular desire to do so. Although there is also a sexual implication here that I recognized later, that was not my focus while writing this poem.
She is in my arms
Her body signs one last breath
She is in my heart
My wife did not , literally, die in my arms. The focus here is on the transition from having the joy of physical contact when she was alive to letting go and accepting that our doing so again is gone forever. It is about the fleeting moment between life and death that will forever seem surreal.
The first rush of love
Overwhelms all sanity
Crazy is not bad
Anybody who has ever fallen in love remembers how overwhelmingly giddy one feels when it is happening the first time. It is not a rational thing, and you feel a little nuts, but it feels so good!
Our ashes are mixed
We are together again
Give us to the wind
We each wanted to be cremated rather than buried in the conventional way. This poems imagines the time when our ashes are mixed and then allowed to blow away in the wind and nourish the earth.
Cuddling in bed
Your warm back against my front
Sweet, sweet memories
This is a little like the third poem above, but applies more to the time of going to bed, and all through the night, rather than the time of getting up in the morning. Dot would often ask: "Can I put my tummy against your back?" It seems that spooning is about as intimate as a couple can get without having sex.
Electric scooter
Alone now in the garage
Missing its rider
In the few years before her death, my wife was having a lot of pain in her hip and her leg and that pain kept her from being able to walk very far. Even after having a hip replacement and stents placed in her femoral arteries, she couldn't walk very far, so we bought her a little red electric scooter. She drove it like a maniac and with a big smile on her face.
She said it clearly
I'm ready to let go now
Four more days, then gone
My wife had been dealing with metastatic lung cancer for fourteen months and had been in remission twice. She believed she would beat the cancer and that we would still be together on our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Just a week before this conversation, her doctors had said it was time to get hospice involved. She finally accepted that she wasn't going to win out over cancer this time. On the Saturday before she died on the following Wednesday, we were lying on her bed together and she told me that she was ready to let go. We talked about things we needed to say to one another. She stayed to see everyone on Monday night at her 77th birthday party that we held in a restaurant she liked. The next day things got worse quickly and by 5:20 PM on the following day, she was gone. It was the day before Thanksgiving.
Sparks merge into stars
Prairie winds stir the campfire
Phantoms in the flames
We liked to camp with the family and made many trips across the country. One of our most memorable nights was spent around a campfire in the Dakota badlands where the sky ran unobstructed across the flat lands of the prairie. Tending a campfire was one of Dot's very favorite things and I think she must have occasionally been lost in the images within the flames. The whole family associates her with those campfires.
She will love again
There is no reason not to
Memories will fade
Again I imagine that I was the one to pass first. My hope was always that my wife would find someone to share her love with to finish out her life. I know that, although the memories of our life together would always be there, the immediacy of them would fade, allowing her to again enjoy her life. I know from what she had often said to me, that she wished that for me, too, should she go first.
Moving on through life
Mind on a heart left behind
Tears come unbidden
One day when I was driving, I suddenly had a strong awareness of how alone I felt after Dot's death. I found myself crying as if I were an abandoned child. It was the first awareness at the emotional level of just how much my life had revolved around our relationship and how alone I now felt.
Six months to a year
The time they said we had left
She died in six weeks
We believed/hoped that we would have much more time together to deal with things and share our love than we actually had. Fortunately, Dot didn't wait to take care of unfinished business with the family. I saw her become so much more focused toward sharing her love with everyone and demonstrating that any transgressions were forgiven. I think she was able to do what she needed to do to let go in peace.
I mourn for myself
Both old and new loves are lost
One was never real
Part of my coping with my feelings involved finding someone to focus my feeling on after Dot had passed. I had found a wonderful woman friend who was very emotionally supportive and caring. By March, after Dot had died in November, I opened my heart to the prospect that I might be able to love someone again. I discovered that my friend had, briefly, entertained the thought of our having a relationship, but, by the time I was ready to pursue, her feelings had changed. This relationship was a very powerful one for me in many ways and became the impetus for the poems that follow in the Acknowledgment Cycle.
She vibrates with life
Always "on go" for new things
I barely keep up
My wife was responsible for turning me from a self-doubting, introverted kid into a confident and more extroverted man. She used to say that she "was always on GO." She was adventurous and spontaneous to my cautious and conservative; we made a great team and I know I had a lot more fun because of her. She had energy left when mine was exhausted.
Unanswered questions
She chose me from all the others
Why was I special?
Dot had been married before I met her and had dated others after her divorce. I was pretty convinced that I wasn't much of a "catch," but she chose me anyway. I never could understand why, but was always proud and happy that she had. She never failed to make me feel special.
You have amazed me
Including me in your love
You gave me my life
This is an awkward poem to read. It could almost be read as two overlapping sentences: "You have amazed me, including me in your love." and "Including me in your love, you gave me my life." I have always felt that my life truly began after we got married. I had never been as confident and happy before.
Her adoring eyes
Speaking to me from pictures
This love is timeless
I fell in love with Dot's face, particularly her eyes. They were the eyes of a truly honest person. I have some favorite pictures of her that instantly transport me back to the feelings of love we shared.
AWAKENING CYCLE
Months after Dot had died, I found myself wishing for some adult companionship with someone who was outside my immediate family and who was not someone I'd had a relationship with as a mentor or teacher. I had known a woman who was a physician and who was also a cancer survivor who had spent some time with our family on occasion. I realized that I had enjoyed her intelligence and her wit. We seemed to communicate easily about things I enjoyed. Although she was considerably younger that I, somehow I thought that our age difference might not matter as I was looking at cultivating a friendship rather than a romantic relationship. As I began spending more time with her, I realized that I was awakening to the prospect that I might have the capacity within me for a new romantic relationship. I had never expected those feelings to emerge and was ill-prepared to deal with them. The poems in this section are testimony to my struggles to understand my new friend and to deal with m y emerging feelings.
Two friends joining hands
Finding new paths together
Who has the compass?
A new relationship is beginning to emerge and I don't know what to make of it. Where will it go? It could go anywhere.
Lightning and thunder
We await the summer storm
Leaves whisper to us
This is both a reflection on the beauty that the two of us discovered we shared about the powers of nature. It is also about the intensity and volatility of the feelings I was having but didn't have a way to give voice to at the time. The whispering leaves metaphor represented the interlude between the storms of emotions.
Love lies there somewhere
Hidden by forgotten dreams
Eager to emerge
I sensed that each of us had reasons to be cautious about allowing ourselves to slip into a new relationship. I sensed in myself, however, a certain eagerness to re-experience those heady early feelings of love and was both surprised and pleased to find those feelings again.
This is addictive
Writing poems in my head
I'll go haikuku
This poem is just silliness and just for fun. We both needed a laugh.
Our timing is off
There is still love between us
But not the right kind
She told me that, had I been ready a few months earlier, she would have been ready to have a different relationship with me. Since then, her feelings have changed and she has also found someone else she has been spending time with.
Yes I understand
Your wings have been bound too long
Now it's time to soar
I am trying to understand. She is still dealing with the aftermath of ending a marriage, coping with cancer and being unable to practice her profession. It seems to me that she needs to have unhindered space to reclaim her life.
My name doesn't fit
It may be fine for someone
I need one for me
She mentioned that she didn't like her first name and we talked about how some cultures provide for changing one's name after significant events in one's life. There is much significance in names, and they are often emotionally loaded. A name that one chooses for oneself, even it is the name one was given originally, can be empowering.
Kisses on the cheek
Sleepy brown eyes peek open
Smiling dreamy smiles
This describes an actual event when I visited her when she was recovering from a medical procedure and I was showing my caring for her. The feelings I had at this point were like the intimate moments I enjoyed when my young children were ill and restless, often in the middle of the night, and I would rock them and try to soothe them. It seemed that the world would shrink at those times to include just them and me as I willed them to be well and laughing again.
Imaginary friends
Plush lions watch every move
Waiting for bedtime
I had given my friend a stuffed lion as something to hug during her recovery. My imagination led me to picture a child's toy eagerly awaiting bedtime so it could be snuggled and hugged.
Love can be unfair
When it cannot be returned
Should it be offered
This is another poem that could have two different ways to be read: (1) "Love is unfair when it cannot be returned, should (if) be (is) offered" and (2) "Love is unfair. When it cannot be returned, should it be offered?" It has become clear at this point in the relationship that it is not going to go in the direction I was wanting.
Eating blueberries
How can purple taste so good
Let's try more colors
She loved blueberries and I grew them, so I brought some to her to help in her recovery. It was fun to play with the notion of colors having taste.
You seem so perfect
My neediness tugs at me
I owe you your life
If one truly loves someone, they can make no claim on that person. If the other doesn't want to be bound, it is not loving to try to bind them.
The feeling lingered
Fingers touched, then pulled away
It was much too soon
The emotional level of the relationship seemed to ebb and flow. Perhaps it really didn't on her part, but only on mine. There were times when I thought I saw prospects for a closer relationship. Maddeningly, she was always crystal clear that she saw no romantic future for us.
Another step closer
Doubts and fears begin to fade
Ease into comfort
At times I found myself relaxing about the relationship and where it was going--or not going. At this time during the relationship, however, I was probably still hopeful for an eventual mutually committed relationship.
Moving through thick fog
Approaching a rocky shore
A warm bed awaits
I had given up any hope of understanding what was going on. I was tired of the struggle of dealing with the constant threat of an emotional shipwreck and looked forward to just going home and seeking comfort in warm memories of the past.
Not much of a dad
Too wrapped up in his own stuff
He couldn't see me
My father and I were never close emotionally and weren't very comfortable with one another. It seemed to me that my friend had a similar relationship with her father and for many of the same reasons.
Whose life do I live?
It doesn't seem like it's mine
Who am I living for?
This poem depicts the mirroring back of feelings I perceived in my friend at a time when she was feeling miserable from having been through a biopsy procedure. I likened it to the times when my wife and been so inundated with medical procedures that she wondered if she was living for her own purposes or just as someone for the doctors to practice on. In a larger sense, these are often the thoughts and feelings of someone trapped in an unsatisfying live role that seems to be focused more on the wishes of others than on their own wishes.
Love makes you stupid
At least that's what happened to me
When will I get smart?
The early stages of romantic love are about emotions and the surging of a whole host of chemicals coursing through your body and brain. It is not about thinking. While in the throes of love, it seems that the thinking part of the brain becomes a vestigial organ. It is possible to know that you are thinking and doing dumb things while feeling helpless to change what you are thinking and doing.
Protecting himself
The steel shutters are closed tight
Unsafe to feel loved
To feel loved and to know that another person's behavior has the power to influence whether or not you feel loved (or lovable) can be pretty frightening. Letting oneself be open to being loved after having been rejected can be a difficult thing to do.
EARTH AND CHILD CYCLE
I have never lost my childhood fascination wit the world of nature around me. A new flower or insect will stop me in my tracks. I grew up during a time when most children played outside as long as there was light enough to see--and sometimes under the street lamps after dark. There were always new things to discover and I had free reign to move all around my neighborhood without fear. Every adult in the neighborhood knew whose kids each of us were and they all looked out for us. We all had yards with grass and trees. Every yard had flower beds and most houses had vegetable gardens. There were large empty lots where we could build "forts," shoot our b-b guns and generally raise hell in the way that innocent kids of that era did. The Illinois River was just a block away and was the source of vines and trees to climb and rope wings to swing out over the water from the high banks. The town was situated on a bluff on the river that had been occupied by Native American groups long before the Europeans showed up. The least little bit of digging in my neighborhood often brought forth arrow heads, scrapers, animal bones and spear points. Every kid, boy and girl, played in the dirt and worked in the gardens.
I was given the freedom to learn outside of school as well as inside. For the most part, I could come and go as I pleased. In a town of barely 4000 people, finding privacy was relatively easy, but getting lost was nearly impossible. Just like any child who is given a free hand, I loved to learn about new things; I have never stopped loving that. I feel a special affinity for children, partly because I envy their ease of learning new things and partly because I know how small they can feel when they are hurt, or feel lost and afraid. Seeing the wonder in children's eyes when they discover new things, accomplish new tasks and develop new skills is like having new life breathed into me, too. Seeing them hungry, hurting or alone breaks my heart.
The poems in this section are a mixture of the wonder of children and the wonder of nature.
Clouds appear and die
Cicadas sing their life songs
Do trees wear watches?
This is a comment on the natural order of things and how they occur without planning or human intervention. Do trees have to wear watches or consult calendars to go through their natural cycles? More abstractly, wouldn't the world be a better place if we could learn to live with nature rather than try to control it?
Rocks live so slowly
The cosmos spins forever
Patience takes more time
My playground is here
Among multi-meaning words
Life is a riddle
Communication isn't always easy, but it can be fun. Can you understand how, in the English language, because of the way certain letters are pronounced in certain words, the string of letters GHOTI can be pronounced "fish"? It is no wonder that English is acknowledged as a difficult language to learn as a second language. Life in general can be equally understood or misunderstood quite differently depending on one's language preferences and skills.
Hungry brown baby
No one there to hold and soothe
Cry yourself to sleep
So many people of the world live in poverty and with diminished hopes for a better future. In underdeveloped countries, in particular, children die hourly from hunger, thirst, exposure and disease. Many are orphans who have lost all of their adult relatives to the ravages of war, AIDS and poverty. The vast majority of those children are people of color.
Hear my baby cry
Exhausted and without sleep
Will my baby die?
This is the most frightening of times for any parent, whether in a village in an underdeveloped country or in a modern, fully-staffed hospital. The parents are often exhausted from worry and lack of rest and the child is exhausted from fighting the illness that has the parents living in fear.
Swings at the playground
Echos of shrieks and laughter
One child plays alone
I was imagining an adult at a school playground who, when seeing the swings, was transported back to his own childhood playing with other kids at recess. The solitary kid was sometimes the adult himself when he was a child and was involved in something that had totally captured his imagination. It was sometimes another kid who never seemed to have any friends and always played by himself.
Mortality sucks
All the things to see and do
Death screws it all up
Growing older gives us the wisdom to realize what a small part of the universe we can know about in our lifetimes. Who hasn't found themselves wondering with it would be like if we, as humans, had a longer life cycle? We can imagine, but not truly know, what will happen after we die. It may be an even greater adventure.
Beyond certainty
Lies excitement and danger
We dare to explore
No new learning takes place without involving risk of some sort. It we stay only with what is safe and certain, we will never learn anything new. We will not even know if we were right to be afraid and cautious.
Pinned against sand
A shadow tries to pull free
Light shows no mercy
Imagine the shadow cast by a large piece of driftwood on a beach at high noon at the Equator. It is so deep and so sharp compared to the brightness of the sand that one can imagine it held prisoner.
Toys made from tied sticks
Played with on an earthen floor
Imagine the fun
Children in our country, no matter how poor, usually have access to some kinds of manufactured toys in this day and age. That was not always true, of course, and frontier children often made due with whatever they could find to amuse themselves with. Children around the world often live in conditions where their only toys are sticks and bits of cloth. Yet, their imaginations need very little in the way of tangible things to keep them engaged in play, and play is necessary to keep them mentally healthy.
Smiling bright brown eyes
Most of the world's children see
Through eyes just like yours
In the Unites States and Europe, Caucasian people are not reproducing at nearly the rate of people of color. Within a few decades white people will be a minority in Europe and the US, just as they are around the globe. It is likely that, in only a few more generations, all people will be a shade of brown. So get used to it.
Weeds in the sidewalk
Growing between old red bricks
Life holds on tightly
The tenacity of life is astounding, whether it is the grass and weeds growing in a sidewalk, the bacterial mats in hot springs, moss on rocks above tree line in the mountains, or ice worms crawling through sea ice in Antarctica. Spiders are found sailing on silk webs thousands of feet in the air. I wonder what life will look like after humanity is gone.
Sweet watermelon
The taste is like a feeling
Easing through my mind
Some things are just so outlandishly impactful that they defy description using just one of the senses. Sometimes they just represent pure pleasure.
The tree had fallen
Amongst so many others
No one saw it fall
The uniqueness of a given event, or even an individual, is sometimes overlooked when it is part of a larger event, involving many. How noticeable is the death of a particular starving child in an underdeveloped country when so many are dying around her? We will never know her and the talents she could have brought to the world.
Little sleeping face
Flannel pajamas with feet
These are my babies
Sleeping children have a special beauty that touches the heart, particularly if they are your own.
Ready for the prom
Trying to dance in new heels
This is a big deal
Anybody who has experienced a young girl getting ready for her first prom knows that it is a BIG DEAL. You have never seen so much drama and emotion over such a short period of time. We look on with sympathy and pride, hoping that this will be a truly good experience for her.
Embarrassed to death
The fate of a young teen boy
Always getting hard
Anybody with any experience with teen boys knows that their bodies can embarrass them. An especially embarrassing moment comes when they are called on in school to do something in front of a class when, for no reason they can consciously explain, they are experiencing an erection. Everyone but the teacher seems to know.
Blood flows in the streets
Not even political
Neda is a martyr
Neda was a young student who was killed in the streets in Iran when she went to watch the crowds gathering to protest the re-election of the President of Iran as fraudulent. It wasn't clear that she was an actual protester herself. Yet, when the pro-government enforcers fired into the crowd, she was somehow shot and killed. She died in the street in the arms of her friends and classmates. In this poem, I call her a martyr; to her government, she was an enemy.
Trade winds stir the trees
Dreams come and go with a sigh
Sleeping Buddha smiles
This is one of the few poems of the group that is presented in the traditional form of the haiku. There is a statue of Buddha in a botanical garden in Honolulu that is very near a fig tree that is a descendent of the actual fig tree under which Siddhartha received enlightenment and became the Buddha. One afternoon I spent an hour meditating on a bench near that statue. This was part of my attempt to find new meaning in my life after Dot's death. Life and death are a continuum, each end of which is as natural as the other, just as breathing is an act of inhalation and exhalation and just as dreams come and go during the night. Buddha smiles because this is as it is meant to be.
COUNSELOR CYCLE
One learns a lot about the human condition when practicing as a counselor/psychologist for over forty-five years. The most gratifying discovery I made during this work was finding out just how resilient people are and how strongly they strive toward making things better for themselves and those they care about. If one were to hear the depth of suffering and pain many of the people I counseled had to endure, he or she could not possibly believe that the conditions were survivable, either physically or emotionally. Those of us who do this kind of work over time come to feel privileged to be allowed to share the lives of those we try to help. Amidst all of the other thoughts going through my head during the past year, I often thought about people I had worked with and how they had dealt with the trials in their lives. I was reassured by remembering that they had suffered huge losses and survived. They had been able to go on with their lives and, in most cases, actually thrive. I felt hope that I could deal with my losses, too. The poems discussed here are based on my experienced with those I served.
We rehearse our flaws
On the grandest of stages
(No virtues allowed)
It is not uncommon for someone distressed and depressed to dwell on all of their faults. They see all of the things about themselves that are less than perfect and believe that, unless they eliminate all of these faults, they will never be OK. It is impossible for them to value their virtues because they feel they must eliminate all their flaws before they can be worthwhile.
Disappointment lives
When hearts and minds stubbornly
Hold onto the past
The duty of a therapist is to help clients let their minds move. To do this, they try to establish the conditions that will allow the clients to do something differently and break up the patterns that are keeping them stuck with the same results from repeating the same thoughts and behaviors over and over.
It is hard to start
Finding the truth in yourself
Is part of the deal
This is another poem that can be read as if it were a four line poem rather than three. Thus: "It is hard to start finding the truth in yourself," and "finding the truth in yourself is part of the deal." It is a comment on the difficulty of truly engaging oneself. One of the jobs of the therapist is to help clients with this difficult process.
Life brings pain and loss
It can also bring great joy
Take each as it comes
It is hoped that people can accept and deal with whatever comes their way. Important learning can happen as people deal with adversity. It is difficult for many to accept that, even amongst adversity, one can experience joy. Joy does not have to be earned and can be accepted as it comes.
Multiple lovers
Can you truly know yourself
When never alone
Some people seem to move from relationship to relationship to relationship looking for happiness and safety. They cannot bear to be alone for fear that they will become emotionally overwhelmed. To gain real confidence in themselves, those people need to find that they are quite capable of surviving outside a relationship. Knowing that, they will have more freedom within any relationship.
Daddy killed mom
He tried open my door
I never feel safe
A number of my clients experienced extreme domestic violence, including witnessing the hurting and even killing of family members by other family members. If a young girl had the experiences depicted in the poem, how could she ever feel safe with any man?
Grandma is a witch
Everyone is respectful
Her hugs are scary
In the cultures of the American South, the Caribbean, and Central and South America there are people who both believe in, and practice, witchcraft. Some of my clients had relatives who did so. The clients' beliefs were so strong that their fear spilled over into most areas of their lives, particularly if they thought that they were well-known to a witch or person with magic powers.
I am no damned good
My mom tells me every day
I don't want to try
Kids who are treated every day as if they are worthless become so hopeless and depressed that they have difficulty doing even the most ordinary things in their lives. Even through they know, intellectually, that the adults in their families who treated them this way have severe problems, they still incorporate the message at the emotional level where it is far more impactful and more difficult to change.
She is beautiful
Smiling, tan, fit and so blond
I need to diet
Many people are so appearance-conscious that they can't see someone who looks like the idealized images in advertizing pictures without comparing themselves negatively. Many young women end up becoming bulimic or even anorexic in an attempt to be "beautiful."
I sweated bullets
She said she planned to end it
She called on Monday
Those of us who have been therapists for any length of time have had clients who have scared us because we couldn't predict accurately enough when they might attempt suicide. The clients didn't give us enough information in terms of their intentions for us to act protectively and have them hospitalized, so we had to live with anxiety until we made contact with them again. I had a particular client in mind when I wrote this poem, but it could have applied to many, many more. I was fortunate in my forty-five years as a therapist to never have a client kill themselves while under my care.
It's painful to start
Trusting a stranger is hard
Promise it will help
Coming to counseling for the first time is difficult for most people. they have exhausted all of the rest of their usual methods for dealing with their problems before they opt to see a therapist. They want to know that therapy will help them, but they have their doubts and they feel uncomfortable exposing their inner selves to a stranger, even one who is a trained professional.
It had been five years
Still thinking about our talks
She called to thank me
Being a psychotherapist means quickly becoming involved at the emotional level with a person you are just meeting, becoming intimately involved with their innermost feelings for a brief period of time, and then having them leave--often without ever hearing from them again. Rarely, a former client will make contact years later and let you know that things are going well for them and that you had been very helpful to them. If you have done a good job as a therapist, most of your clients will leave feeling more empowered and having more tools for dealing with life's issues. They will feel that those changes have come from within themselves rather than from you. The therapist may find out later that the clients often try to imagine how talking with you might help them with their current problems and do therapy on themselves based of the things they learned while in therapy with you.
I was a mistake
They were young, foolish and drunk
And yet, here I am
Some people have to overcome the knowledge that their births weren't planned and they they were raised reluctantly by parents who probably wouldn't have been together if there had not been an unplanned pregnancy.
Overwhelming pain
Eased little by little
Talking to my Shrink
For some people the therapy process requires great courage and a degree of desperation because what they are experiencing inside is so painful that it has to be dealt with slowly and with a great deal of patience an support by the therapist. Many young people call their therapist their "Shrink" partly, I believe, because it helps them cope with the perceived power differential between them and their therapists.
It's hard to love Dad
He always beats up our mom
He's bad when he's drunk
No kid likes to be abused or be in a home where abuse is taking place. Alcoholism is a major contributor to domestic abuse and violence. Kids want to love and respect their parents, but they often can't.
We try to be good
Somehow we always fail
Being hated hurts
These feelings are those of kids who have suffered emotional abuse, and possibly physical abuse, in their homes. They don't understand what they did that was so wrong that brought on the abuse, so they assume that they are inherently bad. Of course, nothing that they did could actually justify their being abused.
Focus on limits
Your mind will build you a cage
Focus on living
Just like one of the poems above, this poem addresses how a person keeps himself or herself stuck and unable to move forward. People often think in terms of I should, I ought, I have-to rather than I want and I don't want.
Wounded and damaged
Mind and body bent with pain
He will still endure
This is an homage to all of those who have suffered in life and to their will to live and thrive.
THE LONGER POEMS
The longer poems that follow the haiku seemed to flow out of my mind on their own. I felt like I was just writing down something that already existed in some tangible form and I just happened to be the instrument by which they made their way onto paper. I began to write these after I had written the bulk of the haiku. It wasn't a conscious decision, but was just what seemed to happen. They are much more difficult to comment about because they usually encompass a range of ideas, images and feelings. What follows are some of my thoughts about them.
DREAMS
There are night dreams and daydreams. There are nighttime dream cycles averaging about ninety minutes and daytime daydreaming cycles also averaging about ninety minutes. At the peak of these cycles our minds are more involved with our imaginations and we are apt to be unconsciously trying to understand and integrate data we have taken in during our more focused and conscious states. Being able to dream keeps us creative and sane.
Everything in connected and everything is natural and as it should be. But to appreciate that, we need to step back and take some time to breathe. We need to see that we are part of a larger whole and that, no matter how brief the human life cycle is, we have significance in the universe.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This poem is intended to represent the thoughts of a woman; on reflection, it could also be about the feelings of a man. This is a person who, for whatever reasons, shies away from forming committed relationships. There is an implication that the person is not entirely happy with the need she/he feels to avoid making these commitments, but that he/she knows no other way of dealing with the risk involved. She struggles with feeling alone and feeling too close. He is aware that something is not quite right about the choice he is making, but has no insight about what to do about it. She feels she is a good person, and that she is fair in her relationships with others as long as they are fair with her. He thinks about whether or not his existence makes a difference in the world, sometime considering dying and sometimes just thinking about escaping to a world of his own making where there are no others to be concerned about.
SHE GIGGLED IN HER SLEEP
This is a poem about my wife and a wonderful behavior that she engaged in without knowing about it. It really needs no further explanation.
THE NARCISSISTS
One of the things I observed during my years as a psychotherapist is that people with emotional problems can be quite content in relationships where the other person is also dysfunctional to the same degree as they are. In fact, they may completely overlook the other person's flaws because they are so focused on themselves that the other person in the relationship only exists as an extension of themselves. They don't recognize the other as in individual, but only as an accoutrement to their own existence. This poem imagines the relationship of two people who are so narcissistic that their relationship is functional because each of them is equally dysfunctional in the same way and to the same degree. Each imagines that they have a meaningful relationship with the other, but they really only have relationships with their own projected images. However, they are content.
I HAD A KITTY IN MY LAP TODAY
I'm pretty sure that this is original, but it is like so many short poems in children's books I read to my kids when they were young that it may be a theme that I'm repeating unconsciously. I hope it is original. There is a lot to learn from playing with pets and with children. Neither can communicate with you as if they were adult humans. Cats, in particular, seem to come and go as they please. If you try to hold onto them when they want to go you risk betting bitten or scratched. Children are often the same way. So are some adults. you must be patient and appreciate what you get.
CHIANG MAI FAREWELL
Dot and I had plans to travel to exotic places after we had retired. We were fortunate to have seen Machu Picchu in Peru just after we were married. Within months of her retirement Dot had a heart attack. That marked the beginning of a long series of illnesses that made the kind of traveling we had imagined impossible. We were able to travel a fair amount, but not overseas. After our trip to Peru we came across pictures of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and decided that we would go there if we ever had an opportunity to do so. We were never able to make the trip together. About a year after her death, however, I was able to make the trip there on my own, and then to join a small group tour of Thailand. The city of Chiang Mai, Thailand is overlooked by a mountain with a famous Buddhist temple on it. The tour was near its end when we got there and I was also feeling like I had finally honored my wife's memory by making the trip to Angkor Wat. The poem is a commemoration of the trip and marked the symbolic end to my mourning.
EXPRESSION IN BRONZE
I found some new friends amongst the travel group in Thailand and got to know some of them better than I had expected to. All of the people in the group were delightful and each added something special to my experience. One person I came to know better than the others was an emeritus professor of art from a state university in California. He made sketches of many of the things he saw as we went from place to place. I wondered why he chose to sketch what he sketched. He was as quiet and unassuming as his friend and traveling companion was outgoing and engaging. They made a great team and I found myself wanting to know more about them. She was a dance teacher of in public schools for many years and was very supportive of his work. He played the piano wherever he had access to one on the trip. As we talked I learned about his life and about his being finally able to realize a dream of leaving something of his art for the community long after he was gone. He had sculpted a statue representing a strong recurring theme in his work and it was in the process of being cast in bronze. It would eventually be put on display at the Arte Americas museum in Fresno, California.
We cannot create art without bringing our whole history into it. It is not only about technique and skill, but is also about who we are and what we have experienced. What we produce now cannot happen without the experiences we have had leading up to this point. So any work of art is a sketch, a snapshot if you will, of who we are at the moment we are producing it. This poem is a sketch of what I imagined might have been important factors in my friend's life that led to this expression in bronze.
If you have read this far, thank you for your interest. I am flattered and humbled.