My Love and I Saw Maya Angelou Last Night

She was a hurricane
force, speakers woofing big.
She looked right at my love and me
said, “Poetry saved me.  Poetry
will save you, too.”
She said, “Brothers and sisters”
her six-foot frame looming
over lectern
ten thousand eyes at her feet.
“Eat it, drink it, sleep it.
Breathe it in like honey-
suckle on a sultry southern 
day.  Like it’s the
unbearable stench from
spooned bodies defecating,
urinating, menstruating
on the rolling death deck
of a slave ship.”
These images were absorbed into the essence
of the blank page before us
which Poetry lusted to fill.

Dr. Angelou laughed
boisterously exploding into 
the technologically perfect depths
of the packed gymnasium
where dozens of blue and gold banners proclaimed
a pageant of privileged athleticism.
Her eyes twinkled at us as she roared.

My love and I saw Maya Angelou last night.
The light would change her
from burnt sienna to milk chocolate,
from caramel to raspberry,
from peppercorn blue to brown suger.
With a voice as knee-deep 
as Mississippi River mud
and smooth as a woman’s inner thigh she sang
to us she looked right at us could see 
we were lovers for a million years.  Could tell
a million more would pass
like water down the side of a mountain.
And then a million more.  And still
we would be love.   
“Poetry.” she said, hushed in awe,
the way others 
say, “God.”

Patty Mooney's Questions:

Do the gold and blue banners mean anything to the reader?

Could you see Maya Angelou?

To The Ocean

“You couldn’t get out
fast enough,” Daddy said,
years after
I had thumbed west
to begin a life.
He didn’t know the land-
locked feeling I fought
child of seven falling asleep
to the tune of a wailing train
each night
seduced by the desire
to glide along those
midwestern tracks as far
as they would take me,
to the ocean.

When we moved
from Bellwood
to Prairie Village,
quiet somehow unholy
no promise of eventual destinations
to lull me to dream
I longed for the sound
of mechanical horses pounding west,
imagined I heard them,
moved as one with the dust thrown 
from their hooves going away
growing up leaving my father
a man who had no use
for the motion of a big-bellied train
swaying on its endless 
track, click-clack to the ocean
and never back.

Patty Mooney's Questions:

I would like to experiment more with line breaks and white space on the page. 

Any ideas about better breakage?

In The Basket

I have seen beautiful things
in baskets.
A woman I know 
makes hand-twined pine-
needle baskets
enhanced with beadwork
in which one might place
a frond of sage 
plucked fresh,
shells from an ecstatic
walk on a tropical beach
or pottery shards fired 
by ancient hands.

I have a gigantic reed basket
my best friend gave me
in which I keep a hundred puka
necklaces, small polished heishi
to fat cowrie clusters.
It calms me to plunge
my fingers in that stash
of cool hushed shells.

Baskets from China, India, Africa, 
Pine Valley, 
baskets
from workworn hands,
the fingers deft and sure
sculpting an organic womb
bound to nurture 
and contain
contours of emptiness
and readiness.

Patty Mooney's Questions:

Do you think "A woman I know..." is too conversational? 

Do you think "workworn" is too workworn itself?