This one's for the girls! (well, the depressed dead writting ones anyway)

So I haven't made it out of the sad poem phase yet, but next week we have a new administrative assistant coming, and maybe that will cheer things up.  At the very least I'll be out of this silly office and back to a room with windows.  The word of the month is sunrise, and I'm hoping I can hold onto it long enough to make it warmer than what I've felt like writing lately.  But for now, here's what I've got.  Willow is because I haven't written anything fall-ish this year, and Woolf, Plath, & Parker is because I've been reading the work of several female authors (Vindication of the Rights of Women anyone? ) and I found a remark by Margaret Atwood to be true, and both funny and sad at the same time - "Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time." -Margaret Atwood.   So I wrote a poem for the girls, but I'm glad we have the Atwoods, Giovannis and Angelous to keep our spirits high these days :)


Willow

It was late September
and all her leaves were
dropping like tears-
cried for cold remembered
wept for pain to come
and if she had knees
they would have bent
to pray the winds would leave
and if she had arms
they would have reached
for the sun's last warming touch
but all she had was silence
thick as the forest floor
to break with the sound of falling
till she had nothing left to lose.


Woolf, Plath, & Parker
A thousand ways to die
each day, at least
I see them fall -
white, luminous snowflakes
and I stick out my tongue
waiting to catch just one
of the flakes falling
between heaven and hell
turning softly, seductively
moments suspended
in a pounding heartbeat
a peripheral glance
or a subconscious chill
a thousand ways to die, each day-
at least! But none of them
has, yet, chosen
to fall
on me.