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Heart
 If you have heart
You will find home
As you stand in line
On freezing streets.
If you have heart
You are not distraught
Always with loves
When loves need you.
If you have heart
You will hear songs
While others cannot
Discern the melody.
If you have heart
You are above crowds
Forming your own lines
And songs and loves.
If you have heart
You will have you.
-- Manning Warren, Copyright 1982
Mother and Daughter by the Sea
She was female statuary on a flat beach,
Her own curves suggesting the sea’s horizon,
Her hair, wet and tousled, its falling waves,
And her eyes surveyed the still clouds above.
She was a green palm on a grey beach,
Rooted by feet ankle deep in its sands,
She had lost her mother days before,
And could not fathom why
Those clouds above were not drifting by,
Like her own light grey memories,
Of herself as a child and a daughter,
Among the others under her mother’s care.
She was one of those children who dance
Before her as silhouettes on the sand
But she could not picture her own face,
As it was now, but could not find
An image of how she must look
As she started out across the sand.
As seagulls darted in and out of the surf,
As she pushed her hair from her eyes,
She sensed she had found something
Of her mother in the immobile clouds
Above the horizon’s long single curve.
But her mother’s arms could not reach
To her now, to curve around her,
As the tears of her youth fell upon the beach.
Years would pass before she would leave this place,
Knowing the clouds would drift away,
And knowing her drifting mother
Never could console the daughter
The mother had left there by the sea.
Footprints
We made no footprints on church steps,
Left no sign that we were there,
Struggling in the grip of theories,
We cannot help but remember now.
No footprints show us we are here,
In touch, between past touch and future touch,
Without the comforts of vicar and text,
Bound in tactile love, cherishing
That transcendent tension of being
Lost in anotherm of transforming tenderness
And transitive color, beyond any theories,
Of art, and oblivious, finally,
To being bound by our sensual histories.
Struggling to live beyond the frauds
Of place, of time, of memories,
We just go on, without footprints,
No marks on the ground where we were
Or on the surfaces that will meet our feet,
Knowing that where our arms are
May be our meaning, ourselves,
Free, for a while, of laden honesties,
Without the marks of what we have become.
We find the places to place our arms
Sometimes, the places just to be,
Without the nothingness of our marks
On the places we have been,
Free of the theories of footprints.
Jazz
The piano softly touches out
The sentiments of large space
As if I were our child
For a first time “in love,”
Although I never understood
You, like the jazz, too clearly.
The crocodiles do not listen well,
But do remain watchful at the bow.
The rhythm of our spirits,
Sounding out, never more hopeful,
Calls out the fool in me,
As it did when were were wise.
We spoke of everything but
Love -- it was held back as
Your hair was always tied --
At the beach, on a magic carpet
That had to ride the tide,
At the park, with a floating toy
Beneath the arms of sweetgum trees.
At the house, with its empty hearth,
For which you had those girlish dreams,
And at the dark lake, with our picnic
Basket chic and the shack on the road,
And at every pause of every
Searching, wondering, dangling conversation.
Now imagining your touching grace,
Your demeaning way with waiters,
And your way of settling for less,
I pretend you are coming in
Past the bow of the blue ship at the dock.
We spoke of how we would last
On the strength of what it is --
It is a strength like the tides,
Of how the power of circumstance
Must sometimes yield to us.
If not, then for the years,
You will be here with me
Near the dock, as the progeny
Of those crocodiles glide the bay,
In the spirit of the jazz
And the sentiments of its sounds.
-- Manning Warren, Copyright 1982 |
