Gratitude
“The Light‑Weight Coffee Ballad”
This is a light weight video from Sweetie Bird. She had Mom, Vicki, me, turn off the news to have fun today. Taking a break. No Folgers for me, just light weight humor, and light weight coffee with no acid to burn through the atmosphere,
By Vicki Lawana Trusselli 5 months ago in Poets
The gratitude of monotony
There is a kind of quiet that arrives not as absence, but as repetition. It lives in the turning of a kettle that has been turned a thousand times before, in the folding of laundry that will be unfolded and folded again, in the same light falling across the same floor at nearly the same hour each day. At first, the mind mistakes it for nothingness. It calls it small. It calls it unimportant. It looks for escape in novelty, in interruption, in anything that breaks the soft sameness. But the longer one stays with it, the more it begins to speak. The monotony of life is not empty. It is steady. It is a kind of breathing you only notice when you stop trying to outrun it. There is gratitude hidden in it, not loud or triumphant, but patient as stone warmed by sun. The body learns the map of its own days: wake, wash, work, rest. Love returns not as spectacle but as habit—offered in meals prepared without announcement, in doors held open, in the remembering of small needs before they are spoken. Even sorrow, when it comes, finds itself held by routine. It does not vanish, but it is carried. The same hands that stir soup also learn how to endure. And somewhere in that repetition, a strange mercy forms. Not everything must be new to be meaningful. Not everything must surprise to be sacred. The day that looks like yesterday is not lesser for it; it is proof that life continues to insist on itself, quietly, faithfully, without applause. Gratitude does not always arrive like a revelation. Sometimes it arrives like brushing your teeth again, like washing the same cup, like noticing that you are still here, still living inside the ordinary glow of another unchanged morning and finding, unexpectedly, that this is enough.
By Taylor Ward5 months ago in Poets
When creation cries
The rain came suddenly that spring, not with thunder but with the long exhausted sigh of a heaven finally unable to hold itself together. Water gathered in the furrows of the yard. The fence posts darkened. The earth became soft enough to remember every footprint pressed into it. Beneath the leaning tractor a speckled hen spread herself wide against the storm, wings trembling with the weight of shelter. You could not see the chicks beneath her at first. Only the occasional blink of tiny eyes through feathers soaked nearly black. She stood there for hours. Rain slipping from her beak. Mud climbing her legs. The world cold and merciless around her and still she made a cathedral of her body. Nearby, a weathered mother goat stood beneath the dripping lean-to, her sides hollowed by seasons of giving. Her teats chapped raw from the sharp hunger of spring mouths, split and aching from the endless pull of milk-drunk babies. Even her hooves carried pain quiet as buried roots beneath the mud. Yet when the smallest kid stumbled toward her crying, she rooted herself deeper into the earth. Not stubbornly. Not bravely even. But with the ancient sorrowful tenderness of creatures born to nourish whether or not they are breaking. The effort trembled through her ribs. Rain gathered along the slope of her coarse white back. Still she widened her stance for the little one beneath her, lowering her head beside its trembling body as though love itself were a kind of weathering. As though mercy was simply remaining open when every storm has already passed through you. By evening the parking lot beside the feed store gleamed silver beneath the streetlights. Rainwater carried cigarette ash into the drains. Someone laughed too loudly near the gas pump. Somewhere a radio sang through static. Then came the cat. Thin as a whisper. One ear torn. Tail lifted like a question mark toward heaven. It followed you carefully, not begging, not trusting either. Only walking behind your footsteps as though loneliness itself had finally grown paws. When you stopped, it stopped. When you knelt, it waited. And when at last you reached out your hand, that small creature leaned forward with the unbearable courage of something that has suffered and still believes kindness may exist. The rain softened then. The clouds loosened their fists. Across the pasture the hen gathered her chicks and moved toward shelter. The mother goat lowered herself slowly into straw while milk-drunk babies slept against her sides. The cat circled your ankles once before settling beside your boots like it had known you all its life. Night arrived gently after that. Not empty. Not cruel. Only quiet in the way healing is quiet. And somewhere in the wet dark earth, beneath roots and stones and forgotten things, spring continued opening its small green hands.
By Taylor Ward5 months ago in Poets
A Vocal Fairy Tale
When I started on Vocal I wasn’t so sure what would happen. Since joining the Vocal Facebook groups I have received so much encouragement and love and so much interaction, that I wake up every morning amazed that I am still here, admired, loved, and appreciated.
By Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred 5 months ago in Poets
