Eye of the Hurricane

Life has in no way passed me by –
I have always danced in the
Eye of the hurricane.
Caught in the pandemonium of that spiritual orbit
Nourished by the intensity
And the passion,
Doing it my way regardless of
The dictates of current methods.
Deep in the mysterious, ignites a fire
Bringing light –
I am family to blood, and I share its name
For I define my pleasures in expressions
Others see as pain.
Living life in the eye of the hurricane
Where no limits reign.
Few things pass one by one
And you learn that
To live life on the edge is to learn to fly.

© 2005 L. Tripaldi

She Laid Down

She laid down
the waves came up high
crabs dance across the sand

She laid down
cones fell to the floor|
salamanders slide under logs

She laid down
a foot of snow fell on the hills
the hares coat changed to match

She laid down
the sun set for hours
the coyotes sang all night

She laid down
traffic grid  locked  in every direction
the lights came up on Broadway

She laid down
the plane leveled out at thirty thousand feet
three hours to Paris

She laid down
the world at her feet

Wintering

Wintering – by Sylvia Plath

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters—
Sir So-and-so’s gin.

This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects—
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees—the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin

To make up for the honey I’ve taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women—
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.