My dog-eared heart

Dear honored readers:
Due to my savage structural pain these last weeks, I was emptied. My usual way is to have a queue of poems twenty-one days ahead (unless the poem is so timely it must be posted immediately), so I have time to reread, edit, find the right image to pair with it. That queue is now, literally, gone.

I wrote poems before, maybe once every six weeks, but then they began coming more regularly. The day I was introduced to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, my daily practice began. I had been writing prose daily since late 1992, so the every-day rhythm was wholly familiar. Making poems took over my life. If you do not know Rosemerry, go to https://ahundredfallingveils.com/ She’s been writing a poem a day for over twenty years. She is my friend, heroine, cheerleader, and one of the loveliest human beings I’ve even been given the privilege to know.

Here are poems (most freshly edited, some in their original form) that I posted on WordPress before moving to Substack a year and a half ago. If you were one of the kind readers who began following me on WordPress, you may recognize them. I’ll simply post them from that first day, May 4th, 2022, until I build my new queue. I hope it will only be a week before new poems are posted.

After we lost our Emma, a smooth collie, at the age of thirteen, we were dogless for two years, I think. Here she is, at six months.

(from May 4, 2022)
My dog-eared heart

worn and burnished,
notices wonder now

I’m awed 
at the hard and shocking 
bits—ignorance
unfriendliness
cruelty—the list is long

I marvel,
can humans act like this?

we’d best learn from dogs
a friendly lick
snuggles when we’re sad
loyalty, patience, and more

what my dog-eared heart
longs for is a dog