Bonnie Roberts Poetry

"When people tell you that I am a survivor, they are certainly right.  But I have also loved living--and have lived and loved--and sometimes flourished--despite appearances."

 Phantom Waves

I would have given everything
for a house of wood and stone,
anchored on a cliff by the sea, any sea.
A house that would not have blown away.
Only the unbendable cables,
fathoms into the hardening earth,
would have moaned out,
and the tethered house would have prayed
its songs of longing to fly away.
But the cables would have held firm.
I would have stayed cozy by the stove,
knitting dreams in the sleeves of sweaters.

I would have given everything
for a giant-hearted man to have anchored me,
one who could have loved me,
with the strength of moaning cables
that could keep a sea woman
from blowing away.

But who could have kept the white sheets on the line,
the wind socks on the pier, the scarves I wore in my hair
from turning to sails?
Who could have kept me pressed into the mattress down
beside the candle and shuttered window
while the quiet distant bells of the harbor boats rang
their love songs to the sea?
Because all is drawn to the depths of the sea.
Even the clouds that billow far, far above the waves.

All my houses have blown away.
Long-ago friends and lovers glide like unfettered ghosts
through fog at the wharf
and across the smooth boulders of the jetty.
My mother, my father, my sister
float gently in the sea foam or gloaming.

                                                             All houses must be free to blow away.
Else they cry in the night, their warped boards pull and shake,
windows crack, foundations give way to broken pebbles.

I was blown away.
And swam back.
Strong enough to hold a man, a child,
strong enough to hold my life.
Brave enough to swim the dolphin waters of gray light
and the impenetrable phosphorous waters
where stars follow the movement of my hands
and make a shining angel of my face.
I am buoyed up on the waves, my anchors falling away,
moaning as they go,
cables unraveling like in a terrible storm,
telling their stories of captivity and pain
to the very dark, sandy,
cradling
bottom.

 Previously published in Only the Sea Keeps, 2005, winner of the 2005 Skipping Stones Award, winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award (2nd place), and Best Small Press Award, Autumn Pick.  Royalties from Only the Sea Keeps, over $6,000, were donated to aid victims of the tsunamis in Asia and to help the efforts of organizations such as Mercy Corps and Doctors without Borders.  In 2008, Only the Sea Keeps became India’s best-seller.

I love the sea and bay at St. Joe State Park now just as much as I was "into the Mystery" of the floor of Gulf Shores at two years.During our short lives the question that guides much of our behavior is: "Who are we?"  I believe our intrinsic value lies in our very existence, in our being.  The King and the homeless man having no greater or lesser value than the other.  I am not the first to think this, but I may be one of the few to try to say it, aloud, in the South.  But very few, if any, listen.I wrote a poem about this view called "What Is"

Jennifer (Jenny, then) was about five or six.  Her dad took this picture of us looking over into the Gulf from St. Joe State Park Campgounds.  I count this as one of the happiest moments of my life.  I had my own little family then, we were sunburned, watching the last moments of the beauty of this part of the Gulf, which is wild and wide, and later, when we slept with a little sand in our sheets, and the tiny fan on full blast in the Pest Control van we had made into a camping van, I knew I was the most blessed woman in the universe.

For me, to stand at these places is to stand at the start of infinity.

 
Major Writer Influences

Chaucer, Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Kate Chopin, Walt Whitman, Harry Crews (contemporary), Marcel Proust, Garcia Marquez, Charles Baudelaire, Edward Starr, the writer of "The Hokey Pokey," Flaubert, Albert Camus, Colette

Major World Philosophers, Thinkers, Leaders I Have Looked To

 St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Betty Giardini, Friederich Nietzsche, Joseph Campbell, Marvin Bell, Kurt Vonnegurt, William Pitt (contemporary), Jesus of Nazareth, The Dalai Lama (contemporary), Jane Goodall, Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Anwar Sadat, Edward R. Murrow, E.O. Wilson, Mother Teresa, Walt Whitman, Carl Malm, Sister Eleanor Harrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., The Right Reverend Shuttlesworth

"All people are not born human beings; until they learn compassion they are mostly walking, talking hunks of protoplasm."--James William Brooks Gibbs

My dad was of a similar mindset as Little Big Man, though he never read the book.  My dad could be, like his daughter, a bit "hard" in his judgments on discompassionate people.  He and I once agreed that one of our flaws was intolerance.  We were both intolerant of intolerance, and could be quite opinionated--to say the very least--on the issues of compassion and tolerance--and, therefore, quite judgmental, too.  Dispassion has never been my most noticeable trait.  The words "complacent," "apathetic," and "un-engaged" would not apply to me, except when it comes to the world of engineering and most things "metal" or having to do with tar. Even those things give me a headache, and I wish they didn't have to exist.

I engage with all trees, especially sea trees that have been shaped and formed by wind, rain, storms, sea salt.  These are my favorite Carmel, California trees.  I have favorite trees in all the places to which I have traveled in the world.

Poets and Writers (Individual Trees) You Can Read About on This Site, on the NEWS and FRIENDS Pages. 

Send Me a Piece of Current News about Your Writing Career.

Janet Anderson

Anny Ballardini

Joe Berry

John Chambers

Sonia Galloway

Rob Gray

Jennifer Horne

Reese Danley-Kilgo

Irene Latham

Edward Lewis

Carey Link

Susan Luther

Claire Mikkelsen

Monica Williams-Murphy, M. D.

Don Noble

Beth Norwood

Richard Vallence

Gail White

Vanessa Austin

Over time, I hope this list will grow and grow.