Poetry by Elizabeth Durbin

Poems by Elizabeth Durbin

Big Bang

The Universe has its reasons.
Quantum gravity attracts me.
I want my portion.

Why three dimensions?
Why not eleven?

When cats feel fear they lick their chips.
Millionaires survive on lifelines.
I take my TIME.

Some Quarks are my best friends
And everyday I count my protons.

(published in the Serendipity Poets of Cheyenne 2004 Journal)

Grace

Oh, I remember her!
The lady who loved me,
my mother's friend.

Tall, elegantly dressed and coiffed,
she'd bend close.
You have the longest eyelashes, she'd rave.
You're a knockout.

As she straightened, haloed in my eyes,
her perfume drifted through my hair,
as if, of course, my hair deserved her too.

Seismic Shaking

(Written after the earthquake in Brug, India)

I can't predict earthquakes
But my internal seismograph
Has been challenged.

My magma has stopped in mid-flow.
I no longer simmer and biol
Beneath the surface
Or heave huge ricks toward the sun.

My fire has gone cold
As dinosaurs buried in glaciers.
Which is better? Heat and chaos?
Or ice that never melts?

I Long to Say Clearly

I long to say clearly what is in my heart
What I know about the world
What I don't know about myself
I want my voice to resonate with other's voices
In describing life's exquisite pain
And wonder at the thrumming of hummingbird wings on hot
summer afternoons
Or Canada geese clattering like minor-key wooden flutes
As they head north over my house in a wild sky
The general and specific
Love
Why I can't kill spiders
My dog's eyes as I hold his face gently in my hands
A soulmate's soul
I am so frustrated
Too much pain and beauty for one voice to carry
A nest of thumb-size grey-velvet field mice live in my shed
My cat, with claws like scimitars, ate two of them
I helped the third escape

Second Chance

It was a late September day like this one
Summer heat fanned by a cool-edged breeze
A sky so deeply blue and cloudless
It stretched above Earth like an indigo scrim
A sun so warming you could pour it into a jar
To rub all winter into your aching bones
My bones have learned to ache
But then, under that prophetic sky
Possibilities hung in the air like saxaphone riffs
Life was a jazz band
Anything could happen
The future, like the air, winked and shimmered
A fabulous mirage
And I strode toward it gasping with joy
I've never felt that way since -- till now
What has changed?
Had those glittering motes of perfect air
Lodged in my heart
And just this day exploded?

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