POEMS by Barb Tilsen
Sacred Ground
Breathe: a poem for George Floyd
How Do You Treat the Stranger at Your Door
We Choose Love
North Shore Memories
Sky Dancer
For David
Gita
Where Love Resides
Poem for CMN
#MMIW
The Family Circle
Poems: Meta-Musings
The Gift
Closed Mind in Flight
Mama
Early Days
What Happens to You Happens to Me
On Healing
SACRED GROUND
by Barbara Tilsen
when you sing into a baby’s eyes
lightest blue to deepest brown
you gaze upon sacred ground
when you sing into a baby’s eyes
sky-tinged blue looks back at you
raindrop fresh on hot, dry ground
sweet and ancient innocence
eggshell-blue with bursting life
indigo depths of sparkling ponds
embued with life’s mystery
when you sing into a baby’s eyes
sprouting green, all tones between
tender wild grass growing
new shoots reaching to the sun
myriad forest canopies
seeking roots and soaring leaves
connecting earth and sky
when you sing into a baby’s eyes
abundant brown, holy ground
rings out its sonorous hues
feathered wing, free flying mane
wild tree-bark timbre growing
tints of wisdom from the well
traces from beyond birth’s door
when you sing into a baby’s eyes
dark rich earth, mystery of birth
fertile promise of seed in loam
wobbly colt’s newborn sheen
deep like velvet, luminous night
melodic stars, galaxies
resound in celestial space
when you sing into a baby’s eyes
blessed color, vibrant hue
pure and sweet, gaze back at you
a hallowed trust unfolding
troth between tomorrow and today
whose rainbow tones fill out with sound
as you sing on sacred ground
© Barbara S. Tilsen
BREATHE: A POEM FOR GEORGE FLOYD
by Barb Tilsen
Sometimes it moves through the air
Like a current in the stream
Just under the surface
flowing beneath you
Hardly perceived or realized
Then it catches you almost by surprise
But not really
This rising wave of grief
Tangible in the palpable way
of truly communal mourning
And you rise and fall
on the ebb and flow
of waves of sorrow
Flowing beneath the skin
A river of tears
For the beautiful man
Whose brother said everyone loved
Who spoke up for anyone hurt
Whose last breath flowed
Out of his body
under the knee
of cold indifference
callous power
racist intent
the dispassionate
brutal face of hate
Eight minutes and forty-six seconds
His “I can’t breathe”
Carried on the wind
Through 50 states
Circling the world
Gathering cries
Chanting no more
No justice no peace
As people join hands
Stand together and march
Take a knee, raise a fist
To breathe his name
George Floyd
© Barbara S. Tilsen
HOW DO YOU TREAT THE STRANGER AT YOUR DOOR
by Barb Tilsen
How do you treat the stranger at your door
The one who comes in need of comfort
with no place to sleep
Little food
Just the few possessions they can carry in one move
This question is before us all around the world
People displaced, on the move
from the dangerous and intolerable
The refugee, the unhoused
the one seeking harbor and safety
at the border, on your doorstep
fleeing the storms of the world
How do we treat the stranger at our door
Like the Lady in the harbor raising the torch
with poetry welcoming all to this shore
Or with barbed wire, the wall, the guns, the fear
It all comes home to rest in our front yard now
Just across the street in our beloved park
Yes we need compassion and love
But the harsh reality of hunger, unmet needs
of no place else to go
demands concrete solutions
As neighbors we act to meet the need
Bring food and supplies
We call and organize in all the ways we know to
pressure the city, the park, the county, the state
To answer
Not with elusive shifting drifting responsibility
or bureaucratic dysfunction and entanglements
Not to keep people languishing in tents
But to find the solution that is safe for all
Respectful, effective and long lasting
This is not the first nor the last time
we will need to answer
How do we treat the stranger at our door
© Barbara S. Tilsen
WE CHOOSE LOVE
by Barb Tilsen
We choose love
Love will show the way
In wild and troubling times
Love brings the new day
We choose love
May healing love abound
In the face of hate and fear
Let love circle round
The ones who’ve gone before us
are memories in our bones
They carry and sustain us
bring us all back home
The ones who are yet to come
hold the promise in the seed
The flower and the garden
guide how we proceed
Our family is a circle
love always remains
Its strength and its resilience
flows within our veins
Through the joys and heartaches
together side by side
Riding waves of turbulence
we will turn the tide
We choose love
We choose love
© Barbara S. Tilsen
NORTH SHORE MEMORIES ON LAKE SUPERIOR
by Barb Tilsen
North Shore memories ride beside us in the car
Coming unbidden like fog rolling across the water
Popping up around a bend
Whispering in rustling leaves
Echoing in caws and chirps
Birds flying through the trees
Murmuring sounds and sights and smells
Summertime at the lake
Remembering the stories
A fighting fish brought to the net
The bigger one that got away
Cries of gulls remind us of the rich feast
thrown to their hungry impatience
as Paul filets the catch of the day
Our lakeside dinner anticipated the whole year long
Fresh caught trout, Mom’s baked beans
Kathy’s potato salad, Tom’s home-made rye bread
My fresh green salad filled with earth’s rich bounty
and Grandma’s Swedish Butter Cake, a specialty of mine
The evening campfire spits and crackles
as we circle round, guitar trading hands under the stars
Singing songs in the moonlight to the rhythm of waves
of love fulfilled and love denied
of longing, passion, change and healing
Proud Mary and Molly’s Song
Medley of tunes both whole and half-remembered
Gazing in awe as Northern lights dance in the darkened sky
Moon’s shimmering path shines across the water
Remembering the family trips when we were small
Now grown up with children of our own
Mom takes us all to this lovely inland sea
A gift of love the year after Dad died
We bring her again each summer
Starlight, stories and memory
flowing through eight years until she died too
Land and water have kissed through time
on this Great Lakes’ beloved shores
Enfolding people’s stories just like ours
Through generations
Deep enough to hold us all
© Barbara S. Tilsen
Sky Dancer
a meditation from the shores of Lake Superior
by Barb Tilsen
Within her velvet, flowered bag
Dewdrops, the deer
And the comet’s tail
Circle in wild anticipation
Wind whispers
“Will you come out tonight?”
While Moon meditates
On myriad cosmic dreams
She leaps from star to star
Rainbows ‘round her shoulders
Wrapping like a shawl
Arms open wide
She sails the solar breeze
Her streaming colors
Dance across the night
Waves beat upon the shore
Drumming to her song
Leaves, rustling, rub each other
Telling ancient secrets
Midnight magic in the northern sky
Aurora Borealis
Shimmering Northern Lights
© Barbara S. Tilsen
FOR DAVID
by Barb Tilsen
I was twenty-two when I first fell in love with you
With your long brown hair, laughing eyes
And heart so strong and true
You’re still that rebel filled with dreams
daring, brash and bold
Hand in hand we’ve worked to build
a just more peaceful world
With your fist held high you marched the streets
to put an end to war
With your hands outstretched, you’ve reached to bridge
the gulf between rich and poor
Across barriers and borders
you have touched so many lives
And held the children’s future
in arms loving and wise
Through the years, joys and sorrows
I’ve felt your warm embrace
Your rock-like steady strength
and the love that lights your face
In the circle of our arms entwined
we hold the whole world wide
As we share life’s journey
I’ll always want you by my side
Father of my children
My lover and my friend
You’ll always be a part of me
With a love that never ends
© Barbara S. Tilsen
GITA
by Barb Tilsen
Snoozing on the couch
Wrapped in warm sunbeams
Doggie sighs, doggie snores
Drifting doggie dreams
But you always come
When I start to sing
You sit down at my feet
Intently listening
I’m grateful for the good days
You are feeling well
The awful creeping sickness
Leaves you for a spell
Even in the bad days
You try to wag your tail
Breaks my heart, at the end
To watch you start to fail
I float in puppy memories
Nine years since you arrived
Your steady faithful heart
Sweet and soulful eyes
Love is in each moment
A truth you always show
This I will remember
As it’s time to let you go
© Barbara S. Tilsen
WHERE LOVE RESIDES
by Barb Tilsen
One single tear spills down my cheek
I am struck
Thinking how tragic, how sad
That after a lifetime of loving each other
It comes down to this
Sitting together
Side by side
Wheelchair to wheelchair
Holding hands
That’s all there is, nothing more
I’ve brought him to see her again
To the Oasis unit
Locked ward of the nursing home
for those on the steady downward slope
of Alzheimer’s decline
You can’t get out the door unless you know the code
Can’t get out of this disease at all
No one knows that code
We sit with sunlight streaming in the windows
This big room is peaceful and calm today
Other times, residents have wandered by
Shouting or swearing
“Take me home! Bring me back!”
“Where’s my furniture? Where’s my kitchen?”
“I want my mother.”
This lounge is quiet, tranquil
No one crying out, no moaning
No loud voices talking to thin air,
to a long-gone lover or friend, daughter or son
A forgotten argument in some long-ago time
No one moving in that slow solo dance
Within fragments of old memories
We sit with me on his left
He is in the middle, she is on his right
I am drifting in memories myself
Of childhood gatherings, laughter and loving faces
My grandma and my grandpa
My mom and my dad
Who’ve all passed on now
Sweet memories alive, but only in my heart
I think about this aunt and this uncle I sit with today
Both in their eighties, married almost 60 years
She seems oblivious, very much inside herself
Barely smiles when we first sit down
Staring ahead with a kind of sour look on her face
Doesn’t recognize me as her niece, or him as her husband
Those days seem past
since she could look at him and call him by his name
Long time since we’ve been able to sit
and talk about the same thing, or anything
Even have a conversation grounded
in the same perceived present reality
Sometimes she’ll talk in half-formed sentences
Words strung together in ways
I can barely follow or understand
Fleeting memories bobbing in and out of a crazy quilt of time
Another silent tear rolls down my cheek as I muse in the sunlight
Bittersweet—a lifetime of loving condensed
into a passing moment together
He reaches out and takes her hand as he often does when we visit
Sometimes she quietly holds his hand too
But today is different
This day, as he holds her hand
She slowly starts to squeeze his back
Then she strokes it and her face changes
Smiling, she says, “Oh, oh, oh”
She touches his fingers, his thumb and the back of his hand
She says, “This is nice,”
as though her skin recognizes his
Her mind can’t say his name but her body knows him
Memory and love living bone deep
She touches his hand, his arm
His shirt sleeve, and says again,
“This is nice!”
He says, “Oh yes, I like this shirt, it’s a good shirt”
She sits back, hand holding his
Her whole face transformed
with a gentle, sweet, contented smile
It is amazing to be together in this rare moment
Sharing the same intersection of time and space
One single tear spills down my cheek
I am struck
Thinking how incredible
How profoundly beautiful
That after a lifetime of loving each other
It all comes down to this
Sitting together
Side by side
Wheelchair to wheelchair
In their holding hands
The heart bridges the gap
The mind alone cannot leap
Where touch knows touch
Skin knows skin
Cell-deep
Where love resides
© Barbara S. Tilsen
MUSIC IS OUR HEARTBEAT
a poem for The Children’s Music Network
by Barb Tilsen
Music is our heartbeat, our pulse
Weaving through the community we build
Linking the connections we make
Strengthening the support we give
Rooted in the issues we face
Circling through the songs we share
Rising in the harmonies we sing
Flows the inspiring
Healing, transforming
Open promise
of the child
© Barbara S. Tilsen
#MMIW
by Barb Tilsen
Red dress hanging from the trees
Red dress swaying in the breeze
Red dress flying from the pole
Weeping flag, the wounded soul
Red handprint for all to see
Red reminding you and me
Women torn from life above
Families search with grieving love
Stolen child ripped from the womb
Mother thrown in river’s tomb
Missing women, stolen girls
Hidden names, red dress unfurls
Unknown numbers rising high
On floods of tears that fill our cry
Tell the story across time
Genocide, the unmarked crime
Women’s rape goes hand in hand
With broken treaties, stolen land
Missing and murdered indigenous women
Silence cannot be forgiven
Across the land our voices rise
Unmasking hate, greed and lies
No more: the red dress as a shroud
Stirring chorus rings out loud
Minds and hearts together strong
Bring them home where they belong
We lift our voice in love and song
No More Stolen Sisters!
No More Stolen Sisters!
© Barbara S. Tilsen
TODAY MY HEART IS HEAVY by Barb Tilsen
May 25, 2022
Today my heart is heavy
whenever the news arrives of children dying
The six year old just found in the trunk of a car
allegedly shot by his mother
While that story is still freshly told
the News brings yet more details
of the shooting yesterday
with the horror of deja vu
Nineteen children, two teachers
in Uvalde, Texas
2nd graders
3rd graders
4th graders
Beautiful and precious
Murdered
by an 18 year old
with an assault rifle he bought
on his birthday
Leaving his childhood behind
In bloody footprints
Bringing haunting memory
of another school shooting
of our young children
carried in Sandy Hook’s river of tears
Bringing forth the stark truth
that lies at the center
of our country’s stalemated inaction
We are a nation that allows our children
to be murdered
It is our history
A grim unacknowledged legacy
As the heartbreaking sepia-toned picture comes to mind
of large numbers of beloved Native children
taken away to boarding school
Portrait in that sea of young faces
of stolen lives, stolen promises, stolen land
building the wealth of our country
Our children continue to be abandoned
under the facade of personal freedom
when we allow laws
protecting the violence of the gun
to yield yet more gun violence
That make it easy, accessible, possible
for the sick, the wounded
the disturbed to arm themselves
with weapons of war
to spew their confusion, their prejudice, their rage
from the deadly repetitive piercing rounds
of a gun firing in the halls of learning
Sacrificing
the sacred promise of the child
When will we ever learn
When will we ever change
We must meet the reckoning
this moment demands
with the communal courage
our wounded world cries out for
The collective vision our healing hearts require
The determined will our beloved children deserve
Filling tomorrow’s rising heart
with the redemptive power of action, hope, and love
