Peggy DoBreer is a mother, a long time educator, and a poet. She is co-author of 64 Ways to Practice Nonviolence, A Curriculum and Resource Guide, a project of Common Peace, the Center for the Advancement of Nonviolence, and she has self-published four chapbooks. Her poems have been anthologized in Literary Angles: Second Poetic Diversity Anthology, Cracked Pavement and Plastic Trees: Our Gifts to Future Generations, The Mountain Tamaphyr Press Irregular and WordWright's Magazine and she is the founder and curator of Horse of Another Color Reading at the Venice Grind Cafe, now in its second year

Flying backwards

I.

Along the estuary
pelicans fly as hard as they
can against a current rising
to gust strong winds. Wings
flapping against the ether to the
rhythm of the windswept water
headed west for the ocean but
forced further east by the gales. We
are walking huddled against them,
sensing something greater and good.
They are loosing sky, looking
so Kubrick against the cumulous,
facing forward but carried farther back,
seen so up close from the jetty, so
classically confounding
in everyday activity.

II.

Time drips over the bluff. Notice
I wanted to drive you home, tap
your imagination like maple runs in
winter, buoy your neck in my
palms, stretch you taller, wrap
you in reverb and feed
your root to my poem.

peggydobreer 10/06/07

eclipse1

on the ledge
                        of
                                an
                                        eclipse

                                the slow evolution of night

                        half dark from sleep half

            awake for the spectacle

it's a little bit historical

            almost out of real time

as if for no

            better reason

                        than to sit inside this rhyme



II.                          lunar memory
                             calls ink to sand
                             lights the morning road

Oh, India

I have listened to George Harrison
chanting in Sanskrit, until
a wanderlust for Gujurat
pounces on me like a
loose litter of lion cubs.

I am simultaneous: smitten
and stricken, enamored and
terrified. I am walking
through intentions of
passport acquisition and
frequent flyer 's remorse.

I was once a tiny monk,
maybe eight lives old.
I was wrapped in mango robes,
freshly spun from my mother's loom.
I was walking contemplation, a
view from the eyes in the back of his
head, always looking in, unless and
until, looking through.

I was once a black-haired woman,
bent at the well for water. Mustard
flowers surrounded her head
their bounty held the threads
of her shawl mended together. The
colors illuminated her poverty.

I was once the vessel she held,
the one that gathered the water. Om
Asato Maa Sadgamaya ll Om shantih:
shantih: shantih: ll She was re
freshment near the banks of the
Ganges, I was that old tin can.

Peggy DoBreer Moonday poetry reading

© 2007 Peggy Dobreer


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