the writer’s prayer

In the morning when the light falls like water

Over the words

Bless me and hear my calling

Over the words

Open my throat and untie the hard not

Over the words

Save me when I am deep in the well enough

When I am drowning in the desert

When I am diving in the dumpster

When I am mothing too close to the fire

When I falter when I fall into the water

over the words

~ Liana © 8/15

Photo: K.Strejc Ginn

the Muse

somedays She grips you like a lover, other

times She just grabs you like a scrap

of paper . . . writes something down

on your heart… this thought

is yours, it is for YOU…please

SEE IT… cuz if you are busy

not feeling your life, She uses

whatever . . . a fence . . . a flower

a friend . . . the fall

of a load-bearing wall
© Seaver, 2015

the sister wives of Ignacio Rocket on the Vernal Equinox

After an hour in the labyrinth of the French Quarter, Elizabeth remembered, “I think I know a place where we can dance—it’s near the water.” So we moved like a herd of cats towards what turned out to be a polka bar. “Perhaps I should have been more specific,” I said to no one who could hear me above the drone of accordions. My friends drank dark beer from a big boot being passed around. Elizabeth said, “Just let this happen to you!” Then she went off shrieking and leaping around the dance floor like it was electrically charged, bumping and battling for space. Lisa yelled over the din directly into my ear: GOOD GOD, THE POLISH ARE A CLUMSY PEOPLE.

Terri, Helen, Connie and I decided to find the gay bar instead. By now it was raining, so I shed my sandals and ventured barefoot into the late twilight. “There are diseases on the sidewalks here,” said Terri. “There is certain death in my shoes,” I countered.

Four sore blocks later, Helen said this whole night was beginning to feel like a pilgrimage. Terri said we should be getting close. Then Elizabeth was running at us from up ahead, “It’s up here!!” We had no idea how she got ahead of us. “My head feels like 11:59pm in 1999,” Connie said. There was no cover, so we all went in, absorbed by a purple haze of music.

The fog machine made us cough so Terri bought a medicinal round of drink. We danced wild and primitive to a pulsing thrum of ‘90s rock with one hundred of our closest, sweatiest new friends who indiscriminately gyrated against any gender. A tall skinny kid limboed into me . . . he asked my name and I said my name is too old for you . . . he looked affronted. WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? Well, of course that is the question ‘xactly I said… ah come on he smiled Sid Viciously don’t you wanna dance with me… sure ok I’ll dance with you and you and you and you dervishing around everybody until a little Filipino man constricted me. His eyes glittered and his hands slithered but he couldn’t hold me so he conjoined Connie who later worried that some sort of fully-clothed consummation might have occurred and Elisabeth admitted she, too, most definitely felt his filipenis, so hey, maybe we are all sister wives now.

Only Helen made the final leg of the journey with me, into the dripping wet night with naked feet sore from conflagration . . . stepping over the No Trespass chain onto an old loading dock tilting into the delta. We watched reverently on our knees as the Moon revealed a dabbled path of light across the water in the first hour of morning. Before the perfectly balanced scales of the cosmos, we silently spoke the names that weighed heavily on our hearts. We tossed flowers of their faces into ripples that widened with grace and absolution on the equinox.

 

~ Leeanne Seaver © 2012

His story starts this way . . .

“The first poets I admired were the trees. It was a blessing to be surrounded by nature during childhood. It gave me a sensory vocabulary for things that couldn’t be contained in words, by which I suppose I mean feelings, but even more than feelings. Does that make sense? For me, nature expresses truth in a way that explains joy, suffering, irony, and people. Growing up as I did, I had to work hard at understanding the world, and my place in it. I was born William Allen Reed on July 18, 1927, on the backside of Kokomo, Indiana, to a family too poor to feed another child. It was the summer of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone . . . just before the world went dark into the Depression.

We were already living in dire conditions before the Crash of 1929, but things went from bad to worse then. It was a hard-scrabble existence. There were eight of us kids, four to a bed inside the thin walls of the small frame sharecropper’s cottage we rented. We had a coal-burning stove in the middle of the living room as the sole source of heat, and an unheated outhouse out back. There was never enough food and what we did have was often courtesy of local county assistance program. There were no special treats, birthday cakes, or Christmas presents, except for what came from the county. Once I got a light blue sweater, generically given to a “Boy, age 9,” but I can’t recall anything else except the raw feeling of not having what other families seemed to have. It was a stark, meager life made tolerable by my mother and a growing awareness of the beauty that I easily could have missed.

My mother Aldine helped me glimpse the bigger picture. She would show something beautiful just to me, of all her children. She would point out a rose or honeysuckle and in that pointing was a woman seeing more than her bitter, angry, unemployed husband and her hungry, anxious children. It was a vision she shared with me, a quiet leaf of a boy who desperately needed to see that there was more to life. That’s what comes of reading trees and flowers and nature—a grasp of the finer side of one’s circumstances and people. People are a lot like plants. Life has given me ample opportunity to gain fluency in this perspective.

There in the quiet hunger of my childhood, I was a detached observer of the passing scenes. I was raggedy, barefoot, underfed, and hollow-eyed with hair like oat straw. I felt estranged from much of life, a survival tactic no doubt. I’m not sure I can explain how I changed from that skinny, confused kid to the young man who decided he was going to be a doctor; or how I went from a doctor to one of the earliest successful heart surgeons, and then from the surgeon to a horseman raising racing thoroughbreds, and a philanthropist.  A lot of people have asked me to tell the story of how I did that. If it helps anyone to read it, then it’s worth a try.”

…

It took me about a year and a half to write William Reed’s memoirs . . . he talked and I listened.  I came to know his “voice” as well as the way he wanted to sound, which is an even greater challenge for a ghostwriter.  Then I wrote.  And wrote.  AND WROTE.  When I wasn’t writing, I was taking pictures of his beautiful horse farm where the thoroughbreds would race over to the fence in hopes that I had a peppermint for them.  I knew they would stop in time, but the presence of such speed and strength never ceased to make my heart leap.  The book cover photo is one of mine–didn’t know it would end up on the book when I took it.  But it surely belongs there.

We launched the book on November 1, 2014.  The Pulse of Hope is available at http://www.thepulseofhope.com or from Rainy Day Books:  http://www.rainydaybooks.com/WilliamReed

I wish someone had told me.

poster by Josh Shipley

© March 2014