Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

She Runs On

She Runs On and On, and On   A whole lot of nothing happening here in the Department of Creation of New Poems, and so I sat down with DETERMINATION and began to write, the way I used to write before I knew what “good” writing was and before I knew some of what I […]

Sixty Unplugged Minutes with my Love

I used a text to carve an island from a Thursday in two overloaded lives. I typed 10 to 11 Walk with me. Moose Hill. I meant Come. To the refuge down the road, the one where boardwalks hover over murky waters in which juicy clusters of grape-like frog eggs expand in the quiescent womb […]

All This Joy, All This Sorrow

Monday, March 28, morning. It’s snowing as I write this.  Big, fluffy flakes that arrive past the date of our northern hemisphere Spring equinox.  I wonder if they know they won’t accumulate. If they did know, would their especially short lifespan would matter to them?  I suspect not.  Nature cycles despite our self-important desires and […]

I Wish You Knew

In the Garden   Imagine if you will, dear one, dear one and all, that you are sent to manifest something unique and quite vital to the world.  You arrive as rich seeded earth, landing in just the right geographic location to support your eventual yield. The trees and the flowers and the shrubs in […]

Saved

  It is a blessing to find those things that save us in small ways. At the checkout counter a teenaged boy offered to carry groceries for an old couple. They said yes, and I was quietly saved. Last Tuesday, late morning, a brief shaft of early winter sun reached down between sooty clouds, illuminating […]

Everything is a Sign

Of all the offerings, a thousand possible signs, the Spirit Messengers chose poop. A pile of it, excrement of vague animal origins, arranged in a circle too perfect for random, dead center on my front step. And I, lover of beauty, faithful to poetry and all that sings cannot make sense of the leavings; what […]

Conversations with a Ghost

A Dead Friend Speaks Almost a year into my exit from flesh, what we call, when embodied, death, You talk to me, wonder if I help when you struggle and worry, soothe when you rage and grieve. You ask if I’ve retained shape and color, if my long and wild hair, blonde with streaks of […]

Look up! The world is out there.

Reckoning Inside, just shy of sunrise, all over the land people awakened, reached for their small screens, hungry for the tiny words and pictures, memes and videos designed to amuse, entrance, distract from stress and angst of bad news streaming 24/7. The people found ways to laugh, or groan, and see themselves in the scowls […]

Little Altars Everywhere

My home is host to little altars everywhere honoring lives lived, seasons arriving and leaving, the hundred sparks of grace and wonder, sorrow and understanding that pock and foliate hours and years squeezed into the dance of this body, my particular, grand, unbearably blessed and gratefully transient human experience. On good days I go bowing […]

Dragonflies

As I write this, my dear friend Marina lies dying in a lovely room inside the oldest house in an historic and pretty New Hampshire town. A wonderful woman who worked with her in the local general store has taken her into her home. Hospice has set her up well with a hospital bed that […]