Passages

By Mare Heron Hake

Passages moves through Hake's verse and carries the reader from the spring to the creek to the river to the ocean. Each small poem, often written in prose, is both a single moment in time and a flash in the memory of how we live and choose to live. Hake's conversation with the page surprises and enlightens even the most hidden corners of parenting, loss, illness or disability, and the sacred we all carry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669806400

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Copyright © 2022 by Mare Heron Hake.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 02/18/2022

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

A Parable Of The Bells

This Egg

Inhaling For Words

The Shadow Last Here

As The Others Stared

A Classic Presentation Of Symptoms

Swollen Time

Webster’s In Her Wooden Chair

Their Def

Their Descriptors

Refinishing

To Be Judged

And So You Claim Your Death Again

Upstream and Always

About Birds

Wingtip To Wingtip

The Changing

Justin

This Side Of A Gossamer Ending

The Blind Rocks Of Winter

A-Lay

Of Iceland’s Water

Layers

The Easter Hill

Mud Puddle Observance

Chasing The Hummingbirds

Watering

Flying Away

Buried With The Holding Stones

On This Hill

This Is My Poem About Beer

To The Grandfather And Girl When The Flight Was Cancelled

Eric The Lyft Driver

SpiderWalking

Over The Ravenous Field

Dear Rat

This Circle

Mid-Cry

A Posy, A Star, In Anger

What Qualifies As A Mass Shooting

A Wonder

Icarus Known

Raising Cain

Where It Hurts Is

Princess Eyes

The Female And Her Banshee

My Army My Battle

When Afghanistan Fell I Was Here

For The Stag Alone

Without A Tremble

In The Given Water

Sauce

Is To Gather

How to Use a Ferry

Weighted

Bumble Bumble Bumble

Acknowledgements

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to turn the howl into singing

and also, to the person who thinks this is all about them.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Lucille Clifton

You are more people than even you know.

David Wagoner

A Parable Of The Bells

In the beginning there was a hero man and a hurting woman and a baby. the man loved the woman like the stars (he believed) and the woman loved the man like the moon (she said) and in the middle of them a child grew and in the middle of them, the middle of them, the house began to wax and wane and walls to fall. a lame dog stumbles and a rat burrows under the floor and now the woman died, then the man died, all to make the star moon water child alone, the child adult, nothing and everything grew and died in the solo holly tree, sharp leaves pointed, iron and bark and dismembered root. and some god said nothing you can’t handle, I will never give you more, and the child now woman said no keep it, I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for you. and the brass old bells began to toll and so she lived in the sound. Ringing. bringing. the ache of metal and alloy in lost bone, lost teeth, vein, eye, and home. Ringing.

A round decade found more fears and more years and more children and another man. and some god came back and said, look how I have blessed you because I made your legs to open stay open be opened. look how I have blessed you under the knife and needle. I’m grateful you should be grateful for your scars, gleaming across the belly fat of grief. feed what grows for I have known them I chose them (said he) they are lambs (said the sheep). I will never give you what searing her pale skin, and gone the green green holly of red berry bright, gone she who could ring the bell. ring the missing bells for the hour. transubstantiation is a very long word for thin communion.

So woman said what is a planet, rising. what is horizon, our plane of the ecliptic. what moves, scratching under the folded dawn, the curling leaf, the brick red burned leaf, the remnant. see color this color comes again, see this field of slow what was, was of decay, when the blackberry vine dries to thorn watch watch the migration flock in the colder sky of what what remains and the world said do more this) but less that) and listen don’t listen to choirs of