Maggie Westland writes in prismatic perspectives: physician, scientist, woman, traveler.  A lover of all things verbally musical, she especially enjoys poetry as performance.  Maggie has been published in poetry anthologies including If We Dance, Daybreak, and Above us Only Sky; one of her poems will appear in Magnolia: A Journal of Women’s Literature, vol. III, to be published June 2013.   Her work is in British and American literary magazines, both on-line and in print, including Askew and Never Bury Poetry.   She has participated in the 3:15 Experiment, and the Great E-Book Free-For-All on Poetry Super Highway with her chapbooks, Fauna on Sepia Film and New Skin.  Her first chapbook, A Defiance of Daughters is on file at Beyond Baroque in Venice CA.  Her words can be heard on DVDs and on-line pod-casts; she has performed with the The Razor Babes and Moorpark College Dancers.  In 2012, Maggie received 3rd place in the Poetry Super Highway Contest, and 1st prize for an ekphrastic poem in Ventura’s Art Tales.   A featured reader at various venues in Southern California, including Ventura’s Tuesday Night Poets, and the Moorpark College Read.  Maggie’s work can also be seen on You-Tube.  She volunteers with the SEASONS program, performing and teaching poetry to children in Ventura County schools.   Google Maggie Westland to find more of her poems, or check her website at www.maggiewestland.com.

HANDYMAN

poets repair broken dreams, fallen houses, burst
hopes, remember, to save what is left

post destruction, their poems prop up fallen doorways,
     open windows
bring hammers and drivers from pockets of unknown strength

a tool belt always at their waist, they waste little
air, oil, seed stock, pull onions from compost

to know what might be needed in an unhinged tomorrow
is the power of muse, music, words

poets don’t throw away small parts of things
that fall forward from all our pasts

DO IT

Get really real, forget that new speak speech that makes
the scripted world of programmed programs made to
look unmade, seem so unreal.    Get out, get off the
couch, forget the dream world, full of undreamed lives
extremes of selfish self absorbed distorted selves
proclaimed produced puffed pinched pressed made up
with the makeup of both wired and weird desires.
Walk under sky, in sun or rain, along a path or down
a pathless hill.  Look up to branch for bird, down hole
for mole, feel sticky web.   Pick that one fig before
the dove pecks first.

SENTIENCE

Whether I travel across equators, backwards into yesterday
curved like a time zone, or simply cross a road
more and more images crowd beyond retina
clog neural pathways, distract and destroy, overlap
eventually recreate that first rose, that tuber, erupted as tulip
that I may or may not have purposely decapitated.
 
Experience tells us that flowers return in sun
that sentience unfurls  in us all.

PILOT

All things reliable rely on change
must swerve to miss the passing
asteroid, the falling sky.

Who cares if compass needles whirl.
The sextant and the
satellite will be replaced.

We need not fear a simple magnet shift
despair a bit of continental drift.
We didn’t start the fire.
We cannot quench its thirst.

TRANSCENDENTAL

When you find your center, that deep breath, lotus legged
puddle of nothing, it is possible voice will die.
That resonant core might swallow you whole
take you so far out of it all that you cannot
come back.   

Take care that you do not succumb
to false prophecies, Mayan calendars, unreliable
weather forecasts by bubble boobed girls in short
short skirts.     Do not fall headlong into the chasm of
earthquake prediction.

Even one hour of inwardness, focused on oneness
creates isolation, a cell as padded as an asylum.
You will not become birdlike and free to fly, will not
know the secrets of the chamber.   This route leads
to slavery.

It is time to seek human solutions, to dissolve like
the crystal of sugar into interconnection, to look
for resources in the land of diminishing returns on
investment, food shortage, drought, and alarms of
new armament.

The lifetime of oming is over.

© 2013 Maggie Westland