Beat the Heat at our Coffeeshop Writers Group - Linda's poem "Born on Wheels" -My poems: Upon Reading "A Passion in the Desert" by Balzac and "My 66th Fourth of July"

About 96 degrees at 5:37 pm, time of bloggin, after a high of 102.

 Nearly a full house at the Willow Grove Giant Coffeeshop. Thanks, Beatriz, for the photo.

Here's Kym, who took our photo, and did Reiki on my arthritic neck three hours ago. Reiki is energy from one body entering into the affected area of another body. It worked! My neck is still fine.

The group was tremendously interesting today. We shared incidents of synchronicity.

Many years ago, Our Donna lost her daughter Mariel, 15, to meningitis. I happened to be writing an article for the Bucks County Herald on the medium Theresa Roba.

 Roba said she could contact people "on the other side." Although I'm ultra-skeptical of this, I told Donna about her and Donna contacted Theresa, who said her daughter is doing just fine. It was a great comfort to Donna, who has wrin many wonderful poems about her daughter.

Donna read a poem about her newly deceased husband, John. "Butterflies of Hope" was short and extremely moving. She handed it to Kym to read since she knew she'd be too emotional to read it.

An especially poignant line is: "In the end it's no more than a sigh."

"That's exactly what happened to him," she said. He just died of a heart attack right there on the floor of the massage parlor where he went regularly for hot stone treatments.

Donna called Theresa about her husband's death.

"Mariel was there to guide John to the Afterlife," she said. John had not known he had died!

Roba, a Catholic, became a medium or psychic when she was in church, I believe, and saw a vision of a well-known priest from the Middle Ages.

Wait a minute! Did you know that Chuck Berry is still alive? Born in 1926, he's still performing. Am listening to him on Jerry Blavat's rockn roll show on XPN.

Linda read one of her superb poems:

BORN ON WHEELS

Dedicated to Justin on his 30th Birthday

You always lived on wheels:
a newborn infant
perched in a car seat
beside your mother
when she drove
Her 1973 Green Impala

The toy Knight Rider car
was your first one
It cursed at you
from its imaginary dashboard
You hummed your open road song
while holding onto
the sides of the red wheel barrow
as I bumped you along
our backyard's stone walkway

Out in Chester County,
you roller bladed
and skate boarded into adolescence

Every Spring Break,
You traveled in
your grandparents' station wagon
down to Florida
One winter,

you drove to Colorado by van
to snow board the mountains
Other guys attended college,
you took your mechanic grandfather’s cue
studied up in Boston
learned how to fix cars
inside and out
then put them back together again

You inherited the 1973 Green Impala
with its torn off vinyl top
let it go to rust and to the junkyard
then bought a red 1968 Ford pick-up

Your mother gave you a motorcycle
so you could scream down the Turnpike
with your Independence Day spirit
Nothing out on the road
can stop you
as if you were born
on wheels

 1973 Impala.  Nice big ass.

Linda sure can pump them out. After she saw me eating a doughnut that someone had left on our table before we sat down, she said, "You better inject some insulin, Ruthie."

What I did when I got home was get on my stationery bike for 15 minutes while watching Michael Wood's Story of England on PBS.

Beatriz shared an email she got. She had proposed writing a children's book about her beloved Pollinators and the editor said it was tempting, but she had to decline. That's what editors say, decline. It doesn't lessen the disappointment just b/c they eschew the word REJECTION REJECTION REJECTION.

She also shared one of her essays about the hummingbird moth.

 Altho not her photo, Beatriz captures amazing shots of little critters with her Canon with a close-up lens.

While Kym Cohen was getting a message the other day, she began to do Reiki on herself for a pain she was having. She went into a trance-like state and came up with an amazing little story called "We'll meet Again."

Amazing that in a few short lines she could tell a vivid story.

And our Carly was back! This is the first time since she had her heart surgery.

 Look how good Carly looks! She's the redhead behind the green bottle. Restrictions still apply. She can't drive for six months, I believe. And her food is beginning to taste better. After surgery food tasted absolutely horrible! This is a common post-surgery condition for that type of operation, a cow-valve put in her heart.

When I realized the Writers Group was today, I had no idea what to write about until I went on my Blogroll to check some of my fave websites. I scrolled down to the bottom and read Sue Katz's Consenting Adults.

She talked about a short story she recently read. Dutifully, I printed it out from the Internet, and read it before bed.

THIS is what I'll write about, I said to myself, grateful I had an idea.

Of course, when I sat down I had NO IDEA what I would write about, but it came rather easily.

BUT I also wanted to write about the Fourth of July. So I came up with something. I think I'll illustrate them with photos scarfed from the Net.

UPON READING “A PASSION IN THE DESERT” by Honore de Balzac   

There was a statue once
in a small museum in Philadelphia
black with overpowering limbs
of finesse
Balzac, naked like the Panther
he writes about in his
Comedie Humaine

I lie on hot sheets
the summer breeze barely moving
my ceiling fan
and fly to another desert
timeless and immobile
save for the shifting sands
and sly movements of its
inhabitants
the she-panther
standing over a hapless young soldier
she intends for dinner

How Balzac describes the terror
of the soldier!
I put down the book
and wonder how I too
might be eaten alive tonight
and go downstairs to
double-lock my doors

Alas, on this fictional plain
The Panther and the Soldier
rather than coming to blows
fall in love
each bearing the mistrust and perfidy
of its race
and man
the annihilator
has his way

I stand over the bleeding panther
and watch
as she heaves her last
trying to assure her with my eyes
love is worth it
after all.     

On July 4, I watched "A Capital Fourth" on PBS. Hundreds of thousands of people were gathered outside our nation's capital for a concert and fireworks. That's when I knew I wanted to write a poem. There were the most wonderful flag sunglasses and outfits!!!

MY SIXTY-SIXTH FOURTH OF JULY

Dedicated to America on her 236th birthday  

Nothing is forever, not even the sun
but is it wrong for this girl to hope
my country will live as long as
the memory of Christ
or Jehovah’s stern words
to Job?

From my bedroom window
I hear the sound of fireworks
I confess, though I am a girl,
I am no longer young
no longer sit on the slope of
Cain Park with mom and dad
and little sisters three

Life has taken them all from me
and I dwell alone in a yellow house
of memories and photos of
what used to be

Out onto the lawn I go
barefoot
in my nightgown
the moon rides over Charley’s
house
I let it float upon my tongue

You may call it a wafer of Christ
I call it cool and paralyzing
and spit it into the birdbath
where it shivers and lights
up the stars

Tumbling fireworks
expand the western sky
their drumbeats
shaking our block
of cardboard houses

The little American flags
I have put on the lawn
turn their noses to the sky
Long live America, they proclaim
Long live Ruthie

When I go
in twenty years or so
my bundle of memories of
July fourths past
will fly away with me

Our family walking to
Cleveland Heights High School
to sit on lawn chairs and gaze
upward
and inward
never dreaming that this day
is forever locked in my mind
though all of you are gone

Unlike my country
who has already reigned longer
than our fathers in Athens
our wars
our prosperity
our hate groups
our freedoms
climb toward the flag
a patchwork quilt
that leaves no one out
while other nations topple
and ours, now shrunken and tiny,
makes plans to leave before the
sun runs out.     

Painting by Mark Rothko, the most depressing artist I know of

PS - At 6:50 I just ran out to close my car windows. You've heard of a sand storm, right? This is a leaf storm - dead leaves blowing all over. Will it rain or is it only threatening....and thundering.