Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

About My Blog

I started this blog to quiet the voices in my head and heart that have been whispering and cajoling and sometimes yelling at me to write more.

This is a space where all the parts of me—mother, poet, wife, lover of beach stones and furry creatures and frequent toe-dipper in the river of song, Yoga practitioner, and teacher and she-who-cooks and she-who-makes-art and she-who-loves-silence, where all the parts of me can come out to play.

I started this blog to keep myself engaged in dialogue with my soul. If what I write interests you, educates you, moves you, …well, that’s a beautiful bonus.

Most Recent Blog Post

Farther

I’m so pleased that my poem, “Farther”, which I share with you below, was just published in the Spring 2024 issue of Metonym Literary Journal. Metonym is a print journal, available for sale through their site at https://metonym-journal.com/

Poetry is art. While not everything written in all poems actually happened the way it reads, it’s all and always true. This poem, though, is a snapshot in time and drawn from clear memories of my late father in the long-ago years of my teenhood. I wrote it from a place of deep compassion for him. I hope that comes through.

 

Farther

 

I knew where to find you
when the big house was quiet,
the powdered air
thick with Viceroy smoke
parting just long enough
to pull me in, and the couch—
your bed of choice since she left—
was empty.

Out the back sliders I’d go,
onto the patio you built,
down the quick wooded path
behind the home
you’d labored to design,
land cleared by your own hands
and the grudging help of your two sons.

My eyes would scan the field
for your red flannel shirt,
tell-tale column of smoke
twirling skywards
from the butt you gripped
between your thin lips,
frayed tan hat tilted towards
the ground you so loved.

March to November,
early mornings, after dinner,
all day Saturdays and Sundays,
any time you could steal
from the desk job you despised,

your dry spine hunched closer to the earth
as you kneeled among the rows—
tendrils of fuzzy stemmed beans
wrapping the stalks of corn,
cucumbers crawling the ground
over and under the vining ones;
pumpkin, green and orange squashes.

The gardens thrived
as your marriage faltered—
wife gone wayward, stolen
by some untamed expansion of consciousness
outside the lines of your understanding.

You poured your sweat and silent grief
into the dark earth that later clung
beneath your nails, settled into the lines
etched across your broad forehead.

Gardens framed by bright
pest-repelling marigolds
blossomed under your aching hands
as you weeded out broad-leafed intruders
striving for order in a landscape
that defied the rules
you built your life on—

Do things the right way.
Do not abide nonsense.
Stay within the lines.

What must you have thought about
all those long outside hours
alone, temporal,
coaxing bounty from the ground
outside the too-large house,
children grown away,

your work-worn hands
digging for answers
and bringing up only worms?

 

–Melinda Coppola

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read More Blog Posts

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

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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

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Integration

It has been almost a month since my mother passed. It wasn’t unexpected. She was old and ill and tired. She wanted to go, was impatient with the way those final months seemed to drag and throw more miseries her way. I was able to mark 60 of my birthdays

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Headway Happening Here

Smile Last time it was Tuesday, six months and four days ago. The incredible Dr. S managed a first— pedaling the chair back just a bit, your face more accessible, sunglasses shielding your eyes from too-bright light. He touched twenty dulled pearls with his counter, probing slyly, quickly, distracting with

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WALKING HER HOME

Adrift. That’s the word that floated into my teary vision as I sat in my car outside the facility my mother has resided in for the past seven years. These after-visit pauses have become part of my ritual in the past few months. There is always someplace else I need

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What Do You Know?

What do we know for sure? I find myself wondering, lately, if we mostly hold the beliefs that suit our ease. For some, self-contempt can provide a kind of familiarity which becomes belief. For others, there is ease in what’s left after all the anger—which is really a mutation of

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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

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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

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Categorically Speaking

Dubbed One name for a collection of can’ts, of never wills and less-thans, a singular bucket into which they dump the myriad ways she comes up short. Autism. The rusty scuttle whose name expands to encompass the collected others— Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Severe anxiety disorder. Chronic polyuria. Lordosis, Kyphosis. Intellectual

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