Kat Lehmann
Selected Haiku andTanka...cool moss beneath bare feet the clarity of my animal nature soaks into my skin wind chimes
on a still night sleeping children bowlful of night
with just the right amount of moon a sprinkle of stars that taste like old wishes letting go of the unnecessary... autumn maple what we can do together snowflakes
for a moment
I see her face has changed again a sunrise, quietly paints a new sky soaring with his words paper butterfly New Moon
tonight I console myself with infinity |
sunrise breakfast the last morning star fades into marmalade Waiting for an answer I breathe the stolen air and cling to the nothing left between the raindrops
the world beyond my imagination potted plan just another anonymous sweetness… wildflower petal old eyes steady from seeing the beauty taking years to surface deep ocean blue playing house
with toy keys she pretended to lock away what mattered like a grown-up the morning begins
with a shower she asks for hers in birdsong, hugs, coffee, purrs and greens: both yellow and blue alpine lake I wade into fireflies |
abundance feels like forever even shadows return like old love to prove the sunshine a weekend just in time for it to be over the moon winks a crescent then opens again I had a winter once it became a new spring it grew its days to blooming and greened most everything the numbered days
my simple mind can hold the rich Earth pirouettes again without counting dreams written in the dark I decipher scratches morning light every leaf adjusts its position colors of spring push through the soil how many times will the birds sound new? |
Still LifeI am a snapshot of now,
without the struggle or the darkness. Two-dimensional as a flower in a vase, I am cut roots, observing and waiting for rain. A still life of me pinned to a scaffold, a butterfly folded in silent gaze – exhibiting the shape but not the substance. A mannequin posed in perpetual curtsey. Falling UpShe would lie on the grassy hill –
and imagine falling up The feel of the Earth behind her – as they fell together They sailed through constellations – soaring weightlessly as one She led the way fearlessly – brave and flying free Her sadness dissolved like the sky at dusk – as Joy filled her with suns The Fear of ItThey say that
resistance to something inevitable makes it seem worse than it is. Maybe the trick is to give in, try to increase the worry, bend like a tree in the storm, give pain its due, find the center of it and look at it plainly, turn it carefully in the palm of your hand, and realize it can own only so much of you, unless you give it more. It is a balloon that can get only so big. Anything more is just the fear of it. Being a PoemI opened a poem – crawled inside,
felt its rough edges around smooth, concave walls. I – the little spoon – curled knees to chin and speechless in the warmth as I dreamed. Cautiously, I crept out (time later) and steadied myself on the Moon. The poem still flowed through me like blood as if I had been born from it. Its rhythm in my veins brought a spark to my eyes and a sway to my hips – The poem was everywhere I looked. It was grass bending in a breeze that traveled the world, reaching with fingers of wind to gently slip over its green length from broad base to icicle point. The poem was breath as my lungs expanded like inverted trees transforming atmosphere and lightly releasing it like a song. I touched myself as if touching the poem with the mastery of self-recognition only to realize that I am a poem that stirs the souls of the lost and found before sailing like a wisp of one who cannot be owned only borrowed. |
A Heart Made of HeartsA heart is made of hearts,
one from each loved one – collaged in their keeper (that’s me), an emotional cacophony dependent as a colony. What do the hearts do all day? They pump as a matter of business, thud-ump, thud-ump. Sometimes they meet for tea to marvel at their filigree. But mostly they bleed. A heart so divided is always mourning, always rejoicing, always terrified. The hearts fill my heart like a project: so bloated, contradicted and panicked, desperate as an addict. In this tapestry threaded with textured loss, the patchwork finds comfort while scattered loved ones roam, leaving heart-trails through space-time, like breadcrumbs to home. What does the tapestry do? It filters the flow, netting for a pearl. It warms like a crowd huddled in diversity, and eats like a vagrant in scarcity, anonymous as a city. I offer you my quilt of threadbare rags, carefully gathered and colorfully stitched, fragile in its hoarding like binding sheaves. An obsessive curator of precious gems, grieving and groveling to keep away thieves. But all of this fades when I sail on your breath – and my grounded heart, heavy with hearts, grows wings… with a harmony that sweetly sings. HealingIt’s been said before:
deep wounds are slow to heal, if they heal at all. But what if we owned the wounds, the ones that became part of our ecology? What if we stopped pushing them away, even the boxed-up ones that we tried to keep from our food-chains, and in so doing, found a way to heal in wholeness? Maybe we could swim beneath the scars, clear the dark corners of the mind, hold close the tender center of our center like a precious baby, feel the measured weight of it, heavy in hand, and let all of it breathe, finally breathe, let the air come in and open it up, and feel the strength of willingly becoming weak. We could let the hurt rise up slowly, billowing its mourning like incense rising, decompress its darkness like a leaky balloon: releasing the nothing that it once held to stretching. The space that remained could be a monument to those days – days that are gone forever. If we held it close, we could listen to its sad song, place flowers at its feet as we wrote it down, then kill it like an enemy: with love, with love, a dark sheep finally brought back to the fold. And then we could dance, dance, dance… just because we can. Tankasomeday
untethered I will surely rise to slip between the light of the stars |