"rolls out like the ocean / rolls in like the sea" -Patsy Rahn

Patsy Rahn’s poetry and prose is published in various journals and anthologies. Her book, The Grainy Wet Soul, is available from bookstores online. In 2021, she received the People's Choice Award from the 5th Open Eurasion Literary Festival of Festivals. Videos of her readings can be found on her website and You Tube. 

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Patsy, what poems have you brought for us today?


Honey Bunny


You are my honey bunny, my saw-edged sweetie pie, my one and only jaunty
Jim so swim on and deliver the goods down mainstream next to the baker, the maker,
the honey-eyed forsaker lending liverwurst to the neighbors down the way whose green
door hangs ajar and sways, sways, sways – for almost a day not telling a soul what
it knows from closing and opening its eye aligned with the sun as it rises at the
end of main street ready to weep at little bo peep whose sheep are a-stray,
far, far away not tilling the soil but moiling over bumpy roots like popped up
veins whose arms reach to the end of the neighborhood road, no where to go but
to see my honey bun, my sweet glazed donut my front page headline
you make my hair end, and my finger nails begin, in soggy wet rags of
ruminations running with Jack and Jill, the hill before them begging for forgiveness which they meet with their feet stomping up its gravel path while giggles reach the
top before them. Oh my sweet honey bunny you make everything sing, you make
jam roll and jelly jiggle, you send everything heels over head you make my bed a home to miracles so stay on top of the mailbox and return home if undelivered because, my sweet honey song, I will always open your envelope and welcome you in to begin a side-
stitch step that vets your feelings, reeling, a wheeling we are oh so sane together regardless of weather your one-step to my two-step, top hat and tails tucked we cluck and clack along the inside track of news making for the world to wonder at, you’re back
my honey bun, my sugar-time-fun, my honey bunny – you’re back.


Fences


I saw a picket fence that had once been new, now with remnants of paint meant to save it from the wearing of the weather, it leaned and careened across the borderland no longer providing a solid and safe shield against the outside possible intruder for which the fence was originally built back a good thirty years on a summer day when the men who dug the holes sweated into their buckets of concrete and the owner of the land drank iced tea and clinked the cubes in the tall glass as if tapping out a rhythm for the workers who hit the stabilizing posts with wood mallets and shoveled wet gray grainy concrete into the brown damp earth that formed the three foot holes meant to hold the fence posts but now releasing their responsibility and allowing a natural course of aging and gravity to overtake the boards so that their vertical stance now lazed away toward horizontal goal where in the end grass will grow tall through the fence's slats and rabbits will hop over the rotting boards chased by a neighborhood cat hungry from being shut out over night when the neighbor's teenager left with a friend forgetting the cat and now the cat will eat under the leaning fence in the shade from the summer humidity and sun that sucks dry the remaining wood of the fence quickly becoming fodder for green vines and flowering weeds reclaiming the civility the fence was meant to delineate but now releasing its hold while creating new habitat and learning to be a laid down fence over which clouds pass and now its boards gaze up at the sky.


You've been listening to the poetry of Patsy Rahn on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.