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Wednesday, April 01, 2020

National Poetry Month 2020: The Flipside




The Flipside

Your fear stings like a fresh paper cut.
The flipside is brave determination to never give up.

The changes are rollercoaster fast -- disorienting, dizzying.
The flipside is the steady predictable approach of Spring.

Our connection is like the two sides of a coin:
the flipside says, whether we are together or apart, we are joined.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2020


6 comments:

  1. Whew. Are you inside my brain, ML? How can these gorgeous snowdrops peek through, these adorable chicks peep away...I am so up and down. All my love. xx

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  2. This is -- so beautiful. I read a nearly identical-in-heart poem yesterday -- truly, such dichotomies going on:


    Adrift
    Mark Nepo

    Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
    This is how the heart makes a duet of
    wonder and grief. The light spraying
    through the lace of the fern is as delicate
    as the fibers of memory forming their web
    around the knot in my throat. The breeze
    makes the birds move from branch to branch
    as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
    in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
    of the next stranger. In the very center, under
    it all, what we have that no one can take
    away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
    It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
    by a holiness that exists inside everything.
    I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

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    Replies
    1. That is breathtakingly beautiful...thank you.

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  3. Yours and lucky I am to read after Tanita shared her poem, written true. I love that you used the "flipside", Mary Lee. When I go out walking & see the hints of what's coming, I'm then surprised by that other reminder, what's happening to life on the "flipside". Happy April as we will make it!

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  4. I love this theme, and can't wait to see what other poems will show up here. The Flip Side is perfect for right now! Fresh papercut/brave determination. So tiny. And yet so big.

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  5. Thanks for your poem, and especially this last line Mary Lee,
    "the flipside says, whether we are together or apart, we are joined." Reassuring hope for our scary times.

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