Poems

Hi friends. This is my first Instagram post of a poem. The poem’s called “Amethyst,” and it has two visuals. One is this beautiful hellebore, also known as Lenten rose, from my garden here in April. And the other is this amethyst ring that my husband, Peter, bought me around Valentine’s Day.

Amethyst.

I want a round amethyst ring

so richly purple, I will gaze

into the stone and imagine myself

immersed, looking up through wine,

and turn my face

to the bright circle of sky overhead.

I want to go around telling people

about the quirky origins of words.

I do this already, but I want

my students to drink it in, not think, 

“word nerd,” and turn their faces

down to the bright rectangle in their hands.

I tell them anyway–amethyst means “not drunk.” 

Ancients believed it warded off

intoxication. Bishops wear an amethyst ring

to show they are filled not with spirits,

but with the Spirit. You may kiss the ring

for forgiveness, or when you pray

to want to want not to drink.

I want to want to go to strength-training class. 

I mean, I go. I do. But desire

has no part in it. Just a keen wanting

to keep walking without a hitch

as long as I can. I want, if I slip on ice, 

to fall on my ass, say, Ope! 

and get up again, pride bruised, bones intact.

Before my knuckles start to swell,

before you notice this is an age spot, 

not a freckle on my hand,

I want that amethyst ring, my love.

I want you to kiss it.

Hi, This is my Instagram poetry post #2, “A Word from Your Bones,” (brought to you by right ankle.)

Your remember on a cold night

like this that you have bones.

They aren’t new. They complain

under layers of muscle, skin, flannel.

They creak like branches

in a gale, Bury us deeper.

Your bones want to be warmed,

so you dig out the feather duvet, 

prepare a chamomile tea,

curl on the couch and fluff

the snow-thick cover over

your precious sack of bones.

Like a top-tier chef sealing meringue,

you close gaps where drafts

might creep in, smooth it down,

prepare your Baked Alaska for the torch.

Your bones are soothed, they snooze

now, dreaming of derring-do, cartwheels,

arm-wrestling matches won

with a fine smack. Of dizzy

times when tendons were supple,

and you tested them daily.

With every leap and landing,

they proved themselves sturdier,

ready to run through fire.

This is from my chapbook from Zeta Taurus Press, Of Peonies and People.

My son Sean did some scuba diving when he was a teenager. We went up to Lake Superior, and he dove the shipwrecks. It was a moment of unparalleled parental angst for me. My son, now 27, gave me permission to read this poem today.

Diver Down

By Amy Higgins

If not for his father, who would

translate my son to me?

Boy whose signals I used to miss

now a man I misread

and love

like air in my lungs.

Seventeen, square face

a window, blinds down.

Sixty feet below

the surface of Lake Superior,

he threads through the spongy

ribs of the Myron—a ship

sacrificed to the gods of November

in that age when ships

laden with iron ore for Detroit,

or Her Majesty’s mail for Windsor

plowed the waves and paid

their tithe in drowned men.

Myron’s captain saw his crew

safe to the lifeboat,

then stayed to steer her home

or founder. Found alive, he

washed ashore on the last scrap

of his ship. His men turned up

months later, all seven—

blue, preserved in ice.

I grow dizzy

waiting for your black mask

to break the chop.

Just surface.

Share this air with me.

It’s Mother’s Day weekend, and my daughter Clare is here from California visiting. So, I thought for my poem today I’d share a sonnet I wrote when she was very small. Still one of my favorites.

It’s called “Clear Night.”

“Clear Night”

by Amy Higgins

Small stargazer, it stuns me how you twinkle,

face tilted back like blue-eyed grass, and bright

in astral light.You know that no sprinkle

of magic sand seals your sleep each night;

you are wise to subtler powers of the sky—

the ancient moon pulling at your blood

with sure thudding, while you return her wry,

slim, crescent smile, my night-wise child, and flood

my hovering soul with peace at all she wakes

in you—an awe which we can never teach

through crafted words, a thirst we cannot slake.

Observe your ears, swirled to pick up star speech.

As I make you tame, Night’s sky keeps you wild.

Stay ever attuned to your mothers, my child.

If you’d like to be under the sea, in an Octopus’s Garden, here’s a poem for you. It’s based on a true expedition in Antarctica.

Under the Shelf

The cleft was dark and electric blue,

a crevasse one might cross

with carabiners, crampons, a pickaxe.

Belay on! Belay off! and you’d swing

from one side to the other of the gash

in Antarctica’s side. But then, 

the chasm cried out, and a piece

the size of Chicago snapped clean,

like a KitKat cracks.

Online crowds, keen to glimpse

an undiscovered country, gaped

at the image stream from SuBastian,

the robot submarine,

probing like a dentist’s

finger beneath a lifted tongue.

Behold a Crustacean Las Vegas— 

an uncanny paradise where neon

spider crabs dance the tarantella

and octopuses lie down with sharks;

Where life capers on in Earth’s

most hostile environment,

elegant, interdependent

enviably ignorant of us. 

This is a poem on the subject of healing. My next writing workshop in July, July 17th at Washtenaw Community College Writing Center, is about healing. This is a poem I wrote about my own healing from a pretty severe bout with mental illness when I was around 30 years old.

And, at the time, one thing that was a great comfort to me was certain passages in the Bible where Jesus had healed someone who was possessed by demons. And that never made sense to me until I thought of it as, that’s probably an episode of mental illness what they’re talking about there. And so, this poem begins with a passage from Luke, and then the poem. So, here it goes.

Healing

“The twelve were with him, and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils.”—Luke 8:2

If it happened, it happened

long before electrodes,

millennia ahead of Haldol and lithium,

when an infirm woman

was no more use

than a broken jar.

Crack open time’s spine, release a puff of dust.

Her story spreads leaves

like an olive tree, casts shade over the woman

whirling below.

I am a crow tilting my slick head,

watching the rabbi drive her demons out.

Did he pierce her inner hurricane

with magic, or did he simply

see her—a woman wrecked within—

and return her to herself?

I, too, have held demons.

I, too, have returned

whole, bearing water.