I am looking for the counterpoint to my melody
A voice both hauntingly harmonic and intriguingly independent
That when blended with mine creates a masterpiece
-gws
Counterpoint
Category: Love
Pandora’s Box of Love
Love feels like Pandora's Box of contradicting experiences
Love alights you upon a mountain top of elation
And sequesters you in a dungeon of anxiety
Love can feel like Elysian Fields
And Dante's Inferno
Love can make you feel like an accomplished genius
And the village idiot
Love gives your soul wings
And your body two left feet
Love makes poetry of your dreams
And salad of your words
Love inspires amazing highs
And devastating lows
Love is celebrated when it arrives
And mourned when it departs
Pleasure and pain separated by fate's coin toss
A game of chance we cannot stop playing
-gws
Done
“I am done,” is the quietest, most power-filled sentence in a woman’s lexicon.
-gws
Friendship Garden
I am lucky to have cultivated a lush garden of beautiful, meaningful friendships throughout my life. I am luckier, still, to be planted in the deep soil of my friends’ gardens where they shower me in love, and light, and their amazing company. To exist in a well tended garden cultivates a gratitude so profound it can only erupt from me in joyful colors painted with hugs, laughter, and happy tears like sacred rain upon parched earth.
- gws
Not It
“Not it!” I say
Not I
Not me
Not this time or any will it be
I cannot take your heart from you
I know not what to do with it
I will not take your heart from you
Please do not make a gift of it
I cannot be the one you seek
There is no love in me to reap
So I will go and let you keep
The heart you meant for me
-gws
Significant Other
My significant other
Is more other than significant now
I wish I felt better about this fact
I do not miss the now of him
I’m still in love with the then of him
When love knocks you can never know
The beauty or horror in its entourage
You believe love can conquer all
And learn that love is often not enough
My significant other left
A significant mark on me
That is hardly insignificant
-gws
Redwood
The enduring redwood is dead
Meant to withstand
Storm and fire and drought
Heartwood rotted from within
Disease and neglect
Claimed their prize
A reminder that
Sometimes good things die
-gws
The Next Chapter
And so comes the end of the heaviest chapter
The plot twisted dramatically
In the hands of an unreliable narrator
Linear time fractured
Slowed
Ran backward
Perspectives shifted
Creating more confusion than clarity
Muted colors of nostalgia dull recollections
Emotional sharpness blunted
The hollow ache of a long goodbye
Completed with the deliberate placement
Of an arch-ending period.
The next act begins with a page turn
“THE NEXT CHAPTER” written atop it
-gws
Carnations
Ev’ry Mother’s Day
A simple pastel bouquet
Carnations in bloom
To honor your roll in life
As mother and grandmother
-gws
Christmas Without You
I realize that this year’s Christmas
Will be my first in decades without you
That shatters me like a dropped ornament
I wanted us to be a Hallmark holiday romantic comedy
But we were, instead, a Nancy McKeon movie of the week
This year is heavy with disappointment
Like that of not finding that hoped for gift beneath the tree
Or the disillusionment of learning Santa
Is just your parents’ amateur slight of hand
Or that moment in Love Actually when Emma Thompson
Opens her gift to discover it's a Joni Mitchell CD
Instead of the expensive necklace that Alan Rickman
Bought for his sexy secretary instead of his loving wife
You keep trying to gift me expired I love yous
I let them fall to the ground like dry pine needles
Christmas lights wear glimmering halos
From the tears that well when the Carpenters croon
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
I will not hang your stocking
Or buy you a well-considered gift
I will, however, cast a Christmas wish
For you to dream of better days
As you nestle in an unfamiliar bed
That old St. Nick blesses you
With a better life ahead
-gws
Words Wishes and Wisdom 