Poetry and other writing exploring feminism, motherhood, self, the Goddess, love, life, nature, the outdoors, all things beautiful and divine, all things sacred, destructive, and chaotic.
I just want to talk for a minute about women's bodies and shopping. Now, I have what I have always considered a normal body. I am not overweight, nor am I too skinny. I have some cellulose (perfectly normal) in my thighs, my calves are thick from sports, and I still have a waist (at my age and after having a kid). And I love my body--it grew and birthed a child, it has ran marathons and hiked up mountains, it has danced and laughed and repaired itself from illnesses and injuries--but I hate clothes shopping. The thing is, while trying on clothes and seeing how nothing fits even though I pick my size off the shelf, I start to loathe my body. Love body while not clothes shopping; hate body while clothes shopping. Tough equation.
In the dressing room while stuffing my all-of-a-sudden sausage legs into a size 10 pair of pants--damn "skinny" pants!--I start to feel fat. In a size 10. Scary double digits. I wonder, if sizes came in letters, A,B,C,D and so on, would I feel the same about my body? Or would I equate the letters with school grades and think I have failed if I wear a size F? Yet the numbers serve to tell me that the higher I go, the bigger I am. When in fact I am not big. I am just me. My body is perfectly sized exactly right just for me. So how is it nothing ever fits? Why aren't the clothing companies making clothes that actually fit my body? If one pair of pants is too small in the legs, they're too big in the waist. If another fits in the waist, they are two feet too long in the legs. Trying on endless pairs of pants, I find myself longing for the days where people made their own clothes, or had their own tailor.
And don't even get me started on those mirrors and those lights! While the clothing may make me feel fat, the lights and mirrors make me feel ugly! Blotchy, pale, discolored, wide, out of proportion--it's like a fun house mirror. If the companies do that on purpose to try and disorient us into making bad purchases, oh wait, it's working. I bought a royal blue blazer at the store where it looked awesome on me in their mirror, but when I got it home it looked like a Wal-Mart cashier blazer! Sigh. Why do I even go shopping? Oh yeah, I usually don't shop at big box stores. Tonight was an exception. I think I'll stick to my local downtown stores who have signs on their regularly lighted mirrors that say "I am beautiful! I love my body." No more exceptions. No more cheap short-cuts to big box stores. Back to thrift stores and saving up for weeks to buy one item at a clothing boutique! You can't really win with clothes shopping, can you?
There’s a lot of talk about
“Let’s put the soul back in solstice” but how can we do that when we’re a
society of zombies, walking around flat and attacking innocent children with
semi-automatic weapons?
What soul?
A soul is not a compass,
leading you in a moral direction.
A soul does not cover you like
a shroud, or cloak your nakedness.
It does not stand there, solid
as a tree. A soul is not solid.
How can you dare to put it into
something as sure and solid as the solstice? We can count on the solstice; it
comes twice a year.
It returns to us, unasked.
Once your soul leaves, will it
return?
Sun- and soul-free time of
winter: now is when we make our bad decisions—sleep too late, eat junk food,
plot a massacre, mechanically go about our days.
Winter is when you’ll buy the
things you do not need, say the things you don’t believe, break up with the
ones you love because you’re just so glum and sure to find happiness with
someone else, somewhere else.
So, you search for your soul.
You find that giving a hug to
your son’s teacher at school brings a lump in your throat; being serenaded by a
kilt-wearing banjo player in an art gallery brings tears to your eyes.
Oh yeah, you think: there you
are, my soul.
Samantha Kolber 12/21/12
Thanks for reading! And yes, I did write this in seven minutes. Part of my desire to be part of the Holiday Blog Tour was to force me to write, as I find myself too busy these days to engage with my passion. So, sitting down for seven minutes at a time works for me.
A BIG THANK YOU to Icess Fernandez Rojas for putting this Holiday Blog Tour 2012 together.
Please be sure to read the next featured blogger in the tour tomorrow: Thelma T. Rayna at www.theliteraryself.blogspot.com. She has a long list of awards and published books (congrats, Thelma), but more importantly, she writes because it's good for her soul. And yours. Happy reading! And, happy holidays and blessings for the return of the sun.
Breaking News: I will be participating in the 2012 Holiday Blog Tour! Run by writer and Goddard College alumna Icess Fernandez Rojas of Writing to Insanity, this tour features an all-star cast of (mostly) women writers & artists in all genres: short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, painting, illustration, and more!
Mark your calendars to discover some amazing blog--I mean writing--talent (I will be writing a Solstice poem on the 21st):
Aching for a reason, and
Because we don’t know any better we
Coalesce our beliefs with our cognizance.
Defiantly we look out instead of in,
Exacting our own
Fates as if we’re surgeons with no
Grief, looking for a
Harbour from our sins, our desires.
Immortality is what will abrade
Justice over time, just as humanity
Kills again and again the spark, that
Light. Salient and
Manic in our search,
Nearing psychotic episodes
Of garrulous grandiosity like
Prayer. But we still pan for heaven,
Quarrel here on earth. We still ask our questions,
Rage wars that tickle His toes. We
Still try and wend our way to Him.
Thinking like Icarus, we blindly scoop our eyes
Upward to gain entrance. The
Very morning comes
Where this is all a dream, an
X-ray image of my father’s neck confirms:
You fly too close, you do get burned.
Zeroing in on the answer, we keep from flying home.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Well none of us ever fit the whole of our soul on one page. I look back through my journal, come across anchored, dolphins, flips end over end. It was New Year's Day.
He didn't say he didn't love me, though he didn't say he did. With the most ordinary garbage floating around in my brain how could I think he'd pick me? I pick and bite my fingertips till they bleed. Trying to be healthy, we're eating rain-
bows and writing down our thoughts. You can't put cerebellum in a poem, he says. The dark and dreamy luxury of winter... Luxury? Winter? What?! Frosted with winter sun, I say, the dark and dreary dream is splintered.
Liminality, then. Identity, too. It's small enough, this boundary to you.
Samantha Kolber
06 January 2012
I see a big tree it doesn't see me I am so very small nothing sees me at all
27 June 2011
Poems published in Red Silk, an anthology of women's writing published by Womanspace of Rockford, IL.
Mud Season in Vermont
April, mud season, also marks the anniversary of my son’s birth. I spread his eight years on the table as if he could be measured or given monetary value. Someone has to write the fable
of his life and keep it like a promissory note. Someone has to witness the new leaf on the maple, tote around the vision, tinged with the belief
that symbiosis is prone to etiolate the mother. The boy, flippant as a magazine. Of course I chose to germinate, to create. But who tells you motherhood is so byzantine?
These eight years my body feels the slake of the turning of baby to boy to grown man. A solemn memory, his body in mine, I take with me in my cells. His life, this spring, rises like a column
from the mud: full of grit and wet black Earth. I’m bound to get stuck. May as well tie me to the spit and roast me. Listen to the sound.
and:
Rant Poem Written in 7 Minutes
I tie a ribbon in a foolish way because I’m a fool and a foolish lover.
I have wet dreams all night about that guy who grabbed my ass.
I have visions of writing a script but have no clue how to write one.
I spend way too much time Googling how to write a script and not enough time actually writing.
I am so happy at the return of the sun.
I have all these lines of poetry bubbling in my head and I fear they will fizzle out and go flat like when you leave a bottle of soda open on the counter.
When I get these lines and words & pieces of poems trying to worm out I feel as if I have a battle raging inside me: a battle between team poet and team responsible.
The latter often wins.
I have yet to learn how to live fully as a full-time poet in this world.
Sometimes I think there must be a different, secret world where poets live.
My son is asking me where the tape is and I want to tell him to shut up.
I only asked for seven minutes and he’s supposed to be brushing his teeth!
I’m still in my pajamas at 2 o’clock in the afternoon.
A dog barks.
The sun is quietly peeking out from behind a cloud.
There are battles going on, both inside and out.
The dog still barks.
Things everywhere rage.
Samantha Kolber
09 December 2010
Truro Sunset
When it drops below the water that’s only the beginning. Musical notes drop and drift like layers upon layers of clouds glowing
and the foam on the crest of the waves are even whiter than the corners of your eyes.
Sky blue pink, but there’s more than that more than the last licks of the fire hat of the sky.
There were seven kings of Rome your dad tells me. Here we sit the four of us watching night arrive, silent as the common man.
18 November 2010
Hubbard Park At Dusk
Here I sit with the melting sky, the sun sunken behind bald mountains, the trees: just sticks I can see through, the screams and laughter and stomping feet of the boys behind me and the light fading imperceptibly so
and somehow I know that each tall pine standing in a circle around me appreciates the sound of the children's laughter piercing the silence ever so shockingly often.
04 October 2010
If a Moment
If a moment could stretch into a day, a year, a lifetime, let it be that moment in the orchard, where the blue of your eyes matched the blue of the sky, and the red cheek of the apple matched my smile, and we kissed and touched and walked the whole length of the row of trees hand in hand, and the ground became the sky became the sun became the invisible stars that look so much like the pinpoints of light on the apple I hold out to you in amazement.
07 September 2010
Sleepy and Septembery
a fall poem written hastily at work on a computer yes, there’s a window next to my screen yes, I see the faint outline of Camel’s Hump on the horizon through fog yes, I hear clicking keyboards and squeaks of chairs yes, I have a florescent light shining overhead and people talking over my head and so this is a fall of sorts: a fall of beautiful surroundings a fall of my freedom to create a fall of my heart into his a falling away from this dullness that has been filling my days making me sleepy making me miss wispy Septembery days
10 July 2010
Letter to my Country in the Middle of the Night:
No, I am not afraid to walk down the deserted street of a beach vacation town in the middle of the night.
I’m not afraid. I am comfortable.
I am lost in a sea, a sea of mediocrity, of sameness, of states joined together by the dotted lines of Wal-Marts and McDonalds on the map.
My dear country who has raised me to be so unafraid and free: Do you see me sitting here in filth?
Don’t you see that “Farm-to-Table” is not just another corporate marketing ploy to generate a profit? Don’t you see that I am lonely, too?
I am grateful to glide through your land unscathed, my dear country, but please just look at me. Look at me and see me. Then maybe I won’t be so lost and lonely on your shores.
