On the Edge of Words

By Debra Kraft

Questions, unquestioned discoveries, and answers in parable and rhyme....

This collection records a journey starting with a 1960s retrospective and the first man on the moon, moving to a new millennium welcomed in with a terrorist spin, family crises, and the games we humans play...knowingly or not.

“Questions, floating like whispers, quietly sifted like sands tumbling through my fingers , softly gliding along the lines that define me, the marks that speak my name, then taken by the winds, a million tiny grains called to other places, to other hands, cast away, unanswered...Until I follow.”

Follow me as “...I pick up a piece of smooth shale, see it skip like the man on the moon, the black and white picture lined with static despite rabbit ears and foil and all of us holding hands, skipping over generations, the gap forgotten, the hippies and Marine brush-cut men and boys, and women in kerchiefs, and me, a tow-headed little girl in thrall to a TV with bad reception , skipping over images like a needle across vinyl...”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debra Kraft
• Release date: Jan 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301714773

Debra Kraft

A writer by nature, Debra Kraft has never experienced a time in which she has not written, although she has taken a meandering path to publication. Her background includes a fine arts degree and work as a junior- and senior-high school teacher before landing in an automotive industry position in the field of quality management. She has had the good fortune to travel fairly extensively, finding inspiration in Japan, England and Mexico, as well as a variety of places within the United States and Canada.

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On the Edge of Words

by Debra Kraft

Text Copyright © 2013 Debra Kraft

All Rights Reserved

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Author’s Foreword

Once upon a time, and now as much as then, I found the words to say what I couldn’t understand. Words have always helped me to find my way through the briars and brambles. In 2004, I pulled my words together into a small, inconsequential book of poetry. This new collection of poems builds from the format of that book. The poems here have grown as I have. They have matured with me through my 1960s childhood to a new era that has me looking toward my own 60s. Many of these poems are old, but reworked. A handful are old and untouched. Others are brand new -- in these, I see some of the mystery of the why of me -- of us -- of everything -- unfolding, although I know the full truth can’t possibly be revealed until my ability to share the words is silenced.

Journey with me on the tide of these words. I hope, perhaps, you, too, will find some understanding within them.

Sections and Contents

Somewhere…

1969

Sleeping Bear Dunes

A Child of the 60s

Maybe Truth skips a generation

I found it!

Questions

On the Edge of Words…

The Why of Me

The Dance

A New Me is Forming

Words Tumbling

Evolution

I Am

With obstacles above me…

In the Silence of a Crowded Room

The Mourning After

My Undoing

Everything Has Changed

On the Loss of My Muse

Courage

Anger Spreads

Crystal Trees

Deep chasms below…

I Weep in the Dark

Sometimes a word is not enough

A Ripening Dawn

Winter Skeletons

Harsh Winter

What's left?

Continental Drift

Exile

This Road is Flawed

Where I rest as I wait…

Tomorrow Brings a Promise

Scattered Thoughts

In Dreams

The Midnight Sun

I live waiting

Family Crisis

disconnected

Comedy of Stars

Dream of Angels

To tell the tales…

Excavating dreams

The Fear of All Our Sums

Home Bound

An Ordinary Door

Faith Long Forgotten

Angel Wings

The Man in the Middle

The Key

Secret Doors

A Girl and a Boy

The Ink They Deserve…

Cigar Strong

My Sister, My Brother

So Many Things

I Hurt When You Hurt

I Will Follow Where You Lead

This Busy World

Each One is Rare

Sister

Pebbles

Say When

So Soon

Heaven

To Define the Mystery…

Beauty Folds

Listen

Your Eyes

Above, the Sky

Ancient Roads

Ripples

A Bubble in Time

Tomorrow’s Tomorrow

I Play

Patience!

Tick Marks

Spiraling Through Time and Space

What can you do?

Life runs in cycles

Out of Hibernation

In the Garden of My Thoughts

Counting Rainbows

Awakening

Elephant and Poet

What 50 Years Have Taught Me

Surround Me With a Garden

* * *

Somewhere…

* * *

1969

I hear their voices

all of them

calling from across years

like so many shooting stars

slipping in on 8millimeter film

the edges brown

burnt from flying too close

to the bulb

to the sun

with Icarus in a galaxy of milk

I hear them

in the whisper of brushing leaves

sand sifting in the dunes

rolling in the wake of a sleeping bear

giggle of the girl I used to be

toes in