Photo by Keith R. Good
Your life can’t be good.
Don’t listen to those who say
God can make a way.
Time is running out.
It isn’t possible your
Changes can be made.
You have to settle.
Don’t believe for a second
Your life means something.
© Marie Elena Good 2024
This is a Reverse Poem. Please read the poem again from the bottom, up. I wrote this 3-stanza poem in my favorite 5/7/5-syllable style.
Painting by Deanna Marie Metts
DETACHED (sijo)
Member of Mensa Foundation. Former business owner,
Now mindful only that this actual moment in time
Is dreadfully not as real as yesterday’s tomorrows.
© Marie Elena Good 2014
EMERGING (sijo)
Weeding worry stubbornly seized in depths of clay soil perdition.
Bleeding time. Believing her beseeching isn’t reaching the Ear.
Then, breakthroughs and dream-come-trues. Not of fantasy, but of being.
© Marie Elena Good 2024
I wrote Detached in 2014 about my mentally ill daughter. Emerging, written now exactly ten years later. Though she still struggles, the difference is immense. There is so much for which to be thankful!
I.
Being proud of my
gratuitous training bra.
Forced rite of passage.
II.
Hollow dissonance.
First solo and ensemble.
Black notes and white face.
III.
Shaving of The Legs
without my dad’s awareness.
Razor-thin escape.
IV.
“Does anybody
really know what time it is?”
My first sleepover.
V.
Kissed by the back door.
Glaringly obvious it’s
my first, but not his.
© Marie Elena Good, 2024
Closet Disco Queen
I was a band nerd.
Not a rah rah. Not a geek.
And not a surfer.
That wasn’t my bag.
But I liked walkin’ the beach
and catchin’ some rays.
I wasn’t a drag,
but not all show and no go.
Like, can you dig it?
I was no brick house.
If I stuck out my tongue, I
looked like a zipper.
Not a dancin’ queen.
Didn’t have the moves, ya know?
(Just keepin’ it real.)
© Marie Elena Good 2024
May we learn by heart
that live is three quarters love
and one quarter “I.”
(c) Marie Elena Good 2017
Image credit: Pexels
My son and I sit together with his little cat family in his humble Cleveland apartment. He grabs his book of Hubble Telescope photos. He is fascinated with the universe and knows a great deal more about it than I do. He turns page after page, oohing and ahh’ing over the astounding beauty. Immensity. Luminosity. Each stunning photo compels him to share with me what he knows, and launches him to the next. I am enjoying hearing the excitement in his swelling voice as we explore multiple moons and distant galaxies.
Then, the Milky Way.
His eyes grow tender. Voice, soft.
“And this? This is home.”
© Marie Elena Good, 2024
CHURCH
Brick and mortar
house far too many walls,
as though Jesus
never came.
A Syrian friend
flees the supper table with
her whole family
leaving home-cooked meal
to decay in silence, as
bombs scream her story.
While bombs shake her house
in Ukraine, a sweet young child
runs out the front door,
glares at a gutless
foe, shakes her fist, and bellows,
“You cannot scare me!”
A gentle woman
from Afghanistan stumbles
as she tries to bolt
away from the bombs
in her path. She breaks her nose.
But her lungs still breathe.
More friends from Ukraine
had no light, no heat for months.
This, in my friend’s words:
“Life is divided
into before and after
war came to our house.”
In shadows, evil
slinks across the globe beneath
our sentinel moon.
© Marie Elena Good, 2024
These are just a few of the stories of war-weary refugee friends of mine. These few don’t express but an infinitesimal spec of the havoc war wreaked on our planet in the time it took me to pen this poem. What we humans are willing to do to fellow humans is unspeakably horrific.
Photo of March Lake Erie morning sky, by Carrie Wakeman
My Father, may I
ask that as the sun rises,
I may sing for joy.
That as the sun sets,
I will recall each moment
spent in Your presence.
Not just for me. For
all whom the sun, moon, and stars
reflect Your love’s light.
© Marie Elena Good, 2024
Photo by Keith R. Good
darkness fell swiftly
air cooled notably
birds fell silent
awe remains
© Marie Elena Good, 2024
#seventeenintwentyfour
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” ~ Psalm 19:1
pictured words 