If you ever lose heart and the earth seems as distant as stars fading into the noise of your busy mind, know this. That a tiny island exists in the blue hands of the ocean. That a tree grows upright into the salted clouds. That two eagles love each other enough to spend their lives greeting the morning sun together. That two eaglets stand in their nest, gazing at the heavens. Looking down to the forever ground. They eat and sleep and flap their wings. And one day in July, one by one, they will jump into the air. They will know the difference between existing and what is beyond. They will hold onto nothing. The hurricane will come, courage catching their pinions on fire, as they mount the wind, climbing ladders into realms of the invisible.


--T.L. Stokes






Saturday, March 6, 2010

for the love of bones

Henry and Alice, he said, and the words
caught my attention. I leaned into the phone
a little deeper. Take photos, he said.
Go to places of the dead, mortuaries,
tell them you're working on a story.
Be honest. Put them together with your
Henry and Alice poems. Pictures of anything
close to lifeless. I'm connected with issues
of people approaching the end of their life,
you're connected with this as well, and with
the dead on the other side. Yes. I agreed this
was a fabulous idea. I could see the photos
in the book already.





note: Henry and Alice are characters in a poem
I wrote about two cadavers we worked on in school.
I took their essence and created personalities,
filling the holes not knowing them left, and
gave them voices and things to do when we shut
the door to the lab at night.
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