Poetry

The Shadow Tendrils

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The Winter Solstice has traditionally been a time of reflection (both figuratively and literally!), particularly with the coming of the New Year. We decorate our environs with brightly colored lights and candle flames, or adorn evergreen trees (which, unlike us, don’t go dormant in the dark, cold months) with light-reflective crystal and metallic ornaments, in an effort to remind ourselves of all that is good, beautiful, and right with our lives, and to spur ourselves on to tweak and futz with aspects that could benefit from a change.

Today, I stumbled across this Villanelle I wrote several years ago smack dab in the middle of summer just after a Hawaiian vacation… It gives me pause to reflect on the ways that light can so easily be obscured by shadow without a good tweaking now and then… May Love and Light be with you all this Holiday Season, and always!

I sat deep in thought for a good, long while
beneath the shadow of a banyan tree
whose tendrils sought the river of denial

and reached the furthest edges of my isle.
Though entirely surrounded, I was free.
I sat deep in thought for a good, long while.

Bird calls damped in the darkness did beguile
from untold hollows looming in that tree,
whose tendrils sought the river of denial.

My mind climbed a high, winding cliff-top stile
to a fog-cloaked abode above the sea.
I sat deep in thought for a good, long while.

But my heights and depths could not reconcile
paths masked by the twilight’s shadow in me,
whose tendrils sought the river of denial.

Hid by its veil, my soul’s begrudging smile
stayed swathed in shadows of the banyan tree.
I sat deep in thought for a good, long while,
while feeding from the river of denial.

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

banyan_tree_kauai

Fuel for Flight

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Aaaand… one more, while we’re on the Shakespearean Love Sonnet theme…  I wrote this for my beloved husband just a couple of years back! Don’t mind the roadside warning graphics — they’re only ornamental!!

from Google Images

from Google Images

Your love once sent me flying to the moon,
But now I’ve landed solidly on ground.
Your jets at idle, I no longer swoon
From ventures superceding speed of sound!

You dress to go on your bi-monthly run;
I dress, if there’s somewhere I have to be.
Your eyes (do they still sparkle like the sun?),
Without my specs, my love, I cannot see.

No longer do I dream of bees or birds–
The hives are barren; nests have blown away:
Our teenagers now speak the “choicest” words,
For we are out of fertile things to say.

My love, though we have traveled beyond lust,
Jets may have cooled, but haven’t lost their thrust…

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

Deliverance

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Just in time for the Holidays… Hot off the presses — whoops, my bad — I mean, let go by a press that’s gone under (Booo!), but now available FREE for your consumption, er, enjoyment!

Google Images

Google Images

While wrapped up tightly to our necks in wool,
Sequestered in our homes in winter’s chill,
Whene’er we yearn to get our insides full,
A cardboard box in car delivers thrill…

Swelling with exhilarating spices,
Its savory scent comes wafting through the door––
Pepperoni, amongst other vices:
Meatballs and cheese and fat and carbs galore!

We sluggish’ eat while satisfaction grows––
All down the hatch, slice after slice, it goes––
Until its warmth has reached our very toes,
And caused onset of shameful gastric woes!

Oh, pizza, how you vanquish dark, cold days
In deviously insulating ways!

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

 

Painted Chickens

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chicken mug

Found in Google Images, this is the actual mug which I still own (isn’t it wonderful?), that is featured in this poem.

Painted Chickens made its debut appearance in Sixfold Magazine, winter 2014 edition. 

Prompted to post it by Amy T., I dedicate it here to all of us who have looked back on our youths, shaken our heads,

and laughed…

Twenty years ago
I received a birthday gift
from a close college buddy-slash-sometime lover
(What on earth were we thinking?).
Back then, our past was already in the past
and twenty-four was already not young.
He gave me a coffee mug
covered in chickens––

yes, painted chickens––

three plump specimens posed around the outside,
and one that looks like an index finger
with an eye, a comb, a beak, and a wattle,
slapped onto the bottom.

How, I can’t fathom,
but my friend knew that those chickens
with their orange-red, expressionistic bodies
would be a boat-floater for me––
the one time I had slept with him
had been an epic shipwreck,

with a silent drive to the airport in its wake;
on the way, we choked down pancakes,
and I stifled sobs in my coffee,
averting my eyes
from the helpless horror in his.
I then flew off into the wild, wide sky,
bewildered, drowning.

Somehow, for years to come,
his southern gentlemanly charms
still served to allure:
he kept his promise to write
and took pains to catalogue for me
the details of his worldly escapades
and various, accompanying sexual conquests,
always making sure to emphasize
the ways in which they were hot for him,
so as to prove those trysts’ relative rightness.

Then, years later, for my birthday,
came the unexplainably gratifying
chicken cup.

Still burning hot
and feathered in their chili-pepper red,
royal purple and verdant green cloaks,
my static and impossibly happy
aphrodisiac chickens
blush like lovers on a Grecian urn;
clucking, urgent.

My southern gent,
now so long ago flown from this callous coop,
wooed another and had his own brood,
as, in due course, did I,
but the mug, no worse for wear, remains
a spectacular feature––
like a bright birthday piñata
(with its promise of sweet reward) ––
of my sacred morning ritual.

These chickens,
still ecstatically surprised,
letting out unabashed, open-beaked caterwauls,
adorn my most aged and prized coffee mug;
a vessel, perfectly-sized,
it cups its contents so adoringly,
fiercely,
like an egg enveloping its cache of gold,
as I take privileged sips.

The big chicken on the left
might actually be a rooster

and that one on the bottom,
a middle finger.

Confessional

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“Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes
on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big
one on me.”     Robert Frost

Toilet-Paper-Art

Today I used a piece of toilet paper––
so ingenious how the squares are perforated––
as a bookmark.

I marked the beginning
of a story in a journal
I pretended to mean to read soon.

My pretensions in the bathroom
are no more elaborate, I’d guess, than those of any other,
so why don’t we confess them, even to ourselves?

Confessionals are outfitted nowadays
with porcelain appliances, brass fixtures,
marble vanities with stacks of prayers in paperback––

(we futilely pray no one presumes these rituals
of bargaining our way out of bondage
to repugnant functions)––

to function as the ultimate ruse.
For no sleight-of-hand swipe performed
(however carefully) with unrolled, folded squares,

nor the most careful illusions of luxury
contrived of bodacious poses above prodigal devices,
will lessen the strain of such unnatural squatting.

Nature will still call from night’s drawn curtain,
beckoning us to the primal business

of dangling truth.

bidet kitty

Difference

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Artwork by Cameren Harper @CamHarpArt

Artwork by Cameren Harper
@CamHarpArt

“I’m a Black Puerto Rican,
Yes I am,
Making some peanut butter and some jam…” (Composed by Marcus P., circa 1981, age 10)

My childhood was marked by our knowing moments
that brought us to our bedroom windows at night
to speak silently across the darkness
with our faces, various antics, flashlights,
and disappearing & reappearing acts.

I was eight years old
when his family moved in,
when the boy my age toed the weeds on my front lawn,
as I watched him from my bedroom window.

Because he was black,
my first memory of seeing Marcus
has been misshapen by a lifetime
spent enslaved by the vernacular
of the prevailing collective.

Subtexts of color for a child
are still primal, unchained.
Whatever difference signified
in that commuter tract neighborhood,
we forged a bond
that was soon cemented in familiarity.

I loved how his hair sprung back like a sponge,
& how his mother groomed him
with Johnson’s Baby Oil & Q-Tips.
I loved his height, his scent,
his lanky, strong, athletic arms,
catching his blazing pitches,
& how we proudly wore matching t-shirts
with our names and baseball jersey numbers
that our moms made with iron-on decals.

Even more, I loved his infectious laugh,
his smart, brow-raising impressions
of Mighty Mouse, Woody Woodpecker,
Speedy Gonzales, and Foghorn Leghorn’s failures
to thwart his young chicken hawk nemesis,
that routinely had us both in teary,
asthmatic hysterics,
sputtering milk out of our noses.

I know my mind’s eye
has since learned to see the conjured rift
between black & white;

I perceive a difference
that even my love
because it is love
won’t deny,
though my heart tries to remember
from a place beyond sight.

I was eight years old
when the boy my age scattered dandelion seeds
outside my bedroom window––
when unsullied, my roots trembled,
& love sprang up
& leaned toward his sun.

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

http://@stephanielharp1

3-DAY-QUOTE CHALLENGE

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I decided to post this “Challenge” (also located on my About/Challenges page) as a single blog entry on my Home page, since I am quite pleased with how it all turned out. The quotations are from among my favorite literary influences (one representative each from poetry, fiction, and non-fiction), and the artwork is my own. Enjoy!  🙂

3-DAY-QUOTE CHALLENGE

4yearoldadult has very graciously taken it upon himself to give me a much needed swift kick in the pants, to get myself into the habit of “blogging” more regularly.  I know that this medicine will be good for me, so I thank him from the bottom of my heart for his encouragement and enthusiasm, and for his efforts to connect with people through cyber-space, to make the world a little bit better!

Day 3: From Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When a woman pretends to press her life down into a nice, tidy little package, all she accomplishes is spring-loading all her vital energy down into shadow. ‘Fine. I’m fine,’ such a woman says… Then one day, we hear she has taken up with a piccolo player and has run off to Tippicanoe to be a pool hall queen…

This is about how it happens.
One day, we decide that we are DONE being everything but who we are.  Unfortunately, we usually have to learn the hard way that we are really not all that into piccolo players…  We owe it to ourselves to remember who we are and what we do want to be doing, and then we have to start doing it, at all costs — because the alternative, which is existential death, is a far, far cry from a substitute for life.

The Hole

Day 2:  Excerpt from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe.  The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria.  During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.  Grunthos is reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.

I very much share the view with the late, great Douglas Adams that there are some very particular offenses that one can perpetrate on the universal device of communication/language, which without exception, result in the phenomenon known as bad poetry…  For instance, I am sure that some of my renderings from my early high school days could have competed handily with the ignominious works of the Azgoths of Kria — and just for the record (in case anyone is taking notes), they have all been dispatched in flame…

Insecurity

Day 1: “On Pain”
               From Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet

   Your pain is the breaking of the shell
that encloses your understanding.
   Even as the stone of the fruit must break,
that its heart may stand in the sun, so must
you know pain.
   And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily
miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous
than your joy;
   And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your
fields.
   And you would watch with serenity through the winters
of your grief.

  • ••

   Much of your pain is self-chosen.
   It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you
heals your sick self.
   Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence
and tranquility:
   For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the
tender hand of the Unseen,
   And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been
fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with
His own sacred tears.

Kahlil Gibran has been and continues to be one of my favorite literary influences. If he had been our contemporary, today’s theorists in psychology might have made him the poster child for the “Highly Sensitive” personality type.  To me, he is a timeless and ageless genius, whose wise insights into both the seen and the Unseen have enriched my development as a writer, artist, and “Highly Sensitive” human being.  I can’t imagine anyone could read his works, particularly The Prophet, and not come away with something life-changing, every time.

Dreams Depths

Death by Colonoscopy

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Gasoline is what it most resembles–
That high-octane concoction for your cleaning
Relies upon the basic fundamentals
Applied to pipes and valves in need of preening.
Like carburetors sputtering to life,
Upon consuming lubricants and fire,
Intestines active with vocations rife
Explode in songs of torrents they inspire!
Though chrome might shine when doused in caustic juices,
And pistons made of steel defy combustion,
Membranes of flesh are known for gentler uses,
Refined for tasks related to digestion!
I dutifully swallowed Satan’s nectar
And rode shit creek without a surge protector!

Sasquatch in Verse…

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Squatchspeare in Love

Together we shall scale the tallest trees

to breed among the Redwoods in the rain.

We’ll scrabble up the steepest granite screes

and make our beds in leaves where we have lain.

When hunkering in snow-dens that we share,

with warmth like ours, we won’t need underwear!

I live to contemplate your tawny hair–

its mats arranged exquisitely with care

When I’m out hunting rabbits in the glen,

you stay behind to nest in groves of sage–your musk attracting mobs of other men

whose growls and wood-knocks aggravate my rage!

Your wry smile stained with huckleberry wine

Says, “Take a number, hot stuff, get in line…”

Song of Squatchaway

I’ve followed in your footsteps with great care:

Their prints are not exactly hard to spy,

especially when you leave tufts of hair

in clumps among the trees seven feet high.

A wiry, manly form of brown and black

and musk of eau de skunk and dead raccoon,

I find your silhouette simple to track

through underbrush beneath the silver moon.

If I were human, I would have the clout

to demonstrate I know just what I’m doing!

With photo proof, I would allay all doubt

That you are real–a guy who’s worth pursuing!

But soft! What snapping sound breaks nigh yon crag?

It’s tree-branch-speak for, “Tiny wants a shag!”

Squatchy

Welcome to My New Website!

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Stephanie L. Harper lives with her husband, two children, two dogs, two guinea pigs, and a cat in Hillsboro, OR, where she works as a Writer and Home Schooling Parent.
In some of her former incarnations, she taught college-level language and literature courses, and earned an M.A. in German literature from the University of Wisconsin – Madison; she also studied at the Northwest House of Theological Studies (where she ostensibly excelled at “answering the call to ministry”), until she became disillusioned with aspirations of “Mastering Divinity,” and finally (re)embraced her current occupation as a Poet.
Stephanie’s poems have appeared (or are scheduled to appear) in Sixfold magazine and Wild Leaf Press Quarterly, and she was a finalist in the Atlanta Review’s 2015 International Poetry Competition.