The month of September holds several birthday celebrations of people I know but none more closer that my one and only sister. This year I actually took the effort of sending Sis a Jacquie Lawson e-card with birthday wishes. Beautifully illustrated themes and stories with a homemade charm woven into every birthday message greeting live on Jacquie's website. Most recent years, with my life schedule birthday cards have turned into an email or a phone call. I am always so humbled when someone takes the time to send me a birthday wish as an card in the mail or an email ecard.
However, this year it simply is not enough to just send an e-card. Maybe because I am not as close to my sister as I want to be, my older sister who I have always looked up to and loved. I always correct myself when I start drifting away like this in my mind, like a piece of wood in the ocean. I take a deep breath in to create a space of gratitude that I even have a sister to talk about. After all, I just want to see her more.
I have friends as well that are September birthday babies and so I am taking this opportunity to wish these autumn miracles of life a splendid day as well. I love my sister. I love my girlfriends who also celebrate September as their party celebration month.
But why stop there? If September is your birthday month, I send you warm wishes of happiness, love, and an amazing year of endless positive surprises merrily finding a path toward you as I write this...
Most recently I was introduced to the work of Santa Cruz California poet Ellen Bass work. Her writing is brave and deep and open. I have included two of her poems for you as a mindful gift to enjoy and ponder. I love poetry. Poetry, in my memory, reminds me of hot summer nights and lemonade and an Indigo sky filled with bright twinkling stars. Good poetry makes my senses stand on end and strokes my heart strings.
Gate C22
At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.
Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching - -
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the main selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.
But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.
This relaxing video is so nice to drift away with. enjoy~
Another Ellen Bass poem~
If You Knew
What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're doing to die.
A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
Happy birthday Sis. Happy birthday Yv, and G.
Have a beautiful day,
photo: 'turning' PKM
Joy,
Rena
www.talktotheturtle.com
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