faithness

my biggest fear

is dying faithless

and wrong about God’s

abandonment

my biggest fear

is that I will forget

who I am and whose I am

to kill another year of bunny hopes

my biggest fear

is remembering

that I was once loved wrongly

and deserved to be

my biggest fear

is leaving poems to mold

among my father’s in the attic

my son also, left, shirking in guilt

three generations old

my biggest fear

is that I will try my best

to love

and find instead rejection

or worse yet, indifference

John Lennon wrote that at its simplest

there are two things only:

Fear and Love

my biggest fear

is “faithness” has gone the way of Faith

leaving Love too narrow to convince us

of our worthiness

      lila pittard levy may 2018

while the birds

while the birds slip into their songs

of betrayal and yearning

I listen with interpreter’s ears

hearing laments

and despondence reverberating

(I could be wrong in my translations)

I am vast in my wanting

I must be rid of this burden

carried for years

on the backs of my loves

now deposited in my throat

and burning

or like a bile risen

on Easter morning

after three decades

in a putrefying cave

inside my own chest

(and people wonder why I retract)

But I am risen this morning

with a tentative hope

like birdsong

away now in the distance

lila.p.levy, may 2018

unexpected sherry

Crisp. Wine as nail polish remover

Wide, then stopping sweet

The taste of mentorship

A working crush, a kooky inspiration

to be better than I am

It’s the manly-sweet voice in my head

A small girl’s pattern

watching her own performance from just inside the door

I try harder

to be worthy of his momentary attention,

to show qualities translatable on a mother’s tongue

My dad kept a small bottle of

acetone-laced liquid in a vial in his desk

MacGyver-like agent that cleaned mistakes

and misspent glue

Later we found it among his accouterments

I am to be writing my annual review

Assess professional contributions

as I twirl a tiny glass

Test tacky connections to colleagues

who might value my performance

from secondhand account

I must revisit each strength and gap

in a year I wish to forget

Perhaps I can submit a poem

My only product ever given full marks

by my father – even though

he never read them through to the end

© lila.p.levy, March 2013