Category Archives: Poem for my brother.

Birds over Computer Fan

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The rite of spring is singing louder.

Louder than my computer fan.

The blue jays are shouting.

The robins are talking over the fence.

The sparrows and chickadees are speed dialing.

 

This is the first spring in the country.

The window is cupped open.

My ears are too,

and the sounds send me back

 

to a dead end street of so much traffic.

Starlings would bounce from shrub to shrub.

Plump orange bellies would bow and pull up breakfast.

 

I could almost hear baby-blue

eggs cracking.

 

Oh how I miss my mother brooding over us.

 

 

© Gerald Allen Barrett and parentheticallyspeakingin3d, 2012.

>Fold In

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>

Fold In
She was making bread and I
asked if she was going to fold
anything into it.
She said she was mixing and
kneading, but no folding.
Bread.
A symbol of so much
Life and body.
Breaking it together.
I have been watching my brother
folding in grief
carefully
by hand
into the bowl of his life.
The oxygen tucked in and again.
The sorrow hidden like yeast to
become the very emptiness
that causes rise.
It is a slow deliberate rise.
A waiting,
living on with hands covered
in life dough and
flour snowing like tears
to the floor.
He folds in
standing almost alone
with the Bread of Life.
For Peter
June 2010
Jerry
This was for my brother.  In January his wife lost a twenty year battle with cancer.  After reading a blog on death tonite and having breakfast with him this morning I remembered this.  His wife’s favorite idea was that of hope.  She was full of hope…right up to the seam she slipped through to the God of all hope.  She set it down next to Pete when she left.