Holding Up No Matter What
I look for a way out as I write, in the midst
of the poem itself, or as I am working hour
after hour online, listening for the fluency
of each speaker and their content, 21st century
high-tech work requiring a Buddhist’s patience,
and the pure grit of a person not giving up,
breathing deep to stay in the moment, knowing
this is the only way to live in a desert as hot as
this one, the Sonoran, one of the hottest in the
world, full of oasis palm trees, an old oasis
surrounded by mountains, covered with big sky.
Those who live here know how to hunker down,
take to shade always, learn to navigate safety
in a place of thorns and reptiles, the tiniest lizards.
I learn to live with such danger to stay safe in a world
getting warmer, a world in which we need to live
in the moment with ideas about new connections.
I know I cannot give up no matter how many years
pass me by and how many poems are needed to help me map
out new solutions and find my way to another morning,
poems that I write on my fat white pads, another
month of them, a woman living alone with a little dog
saving zinnia seeds in a plastic jar and drying them
in the window sill, powerful little things, these seeds.
I’m here with my computer loaded with new works,
sentences spoken out loud with answer sheet grids,
scoring per minute, digital keen and true and later, a small
patch of time for love again, an old friend, and
a walk with my blonde dog under a new moon,
soon a sky full of auroras of light. I am open
to the possible as if each moment is a lifetime in itself.
This is the only way I know now. Coaxing myself along,
using less, collecting seeds, planting whatever blooms.
Charlene Langfur is an LGBTQ and green writer, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow and her writing has appeared in Poetry East, Room, Weber and most recently in The Healing Muse, Still Points Arts Quarterly and the North Dakota Quarterly.
Amethyst Review 