Interfaith Minister, Writer, Poet, Teacher
I love to see a field of thistle
from a distance. Get too close
and you will bleed. But someone
has to chop it down before it
goes to seed and spreads its drifting,
downy, dangerous self into a
field of corn or beans or maybe
where the cattle feed. It has not
many friends except the butterfies and
bees. And I am not one either except
I love to see it purple in a field, far
away, where it cannot make me bleed.
My first job was selling shoes.
Sixteen years old.
Needed gas money.
Bought a cowboy hat with my first check.
Went to college.
Started part-time at a hotel.
Went to full-time when I quit college.
Thought I knew everything I needed to know.
Worked in fast food,
then as a bank teller,
then started waiting tables.
That lasted awhile.
Shifted into bartending.
More prestigious.
Did that through school.
(Realized I didn’t know everything I needed to know.)
Got a Masters degree.
Started teaching.
Part-time, then full.
Had more fun bartending, frankly.
Took a medical transcription job.
More money than teaching.
Got to work from home.
Scattered throughout were the odd jobs –
in a plant nursery,
in a wood-working shop,
in a music studio.
Gave real estate a go.
The mortgage business,
Sales, free-lance writing.
It got downright embarrassing.
Don’t think I’ll tell anyone
I think I might be a poet.
Sunday morning sipping tea.
Different from past Sundays.
No newspaper. No black and white movie on t.v.
No coffee (too acidic, causes arthritis, gums up your joints).
Now I sit at the kitchen table
still in my robe at noon
laptop computer wirelessly surfing the net
from one website to the oddly connected next
like a cyber version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
From the blood type diet to the blood type of Jesus
to a blog about Ernest Angley to a Wiccan site (for balance)
to a chakra site to Shirley MacLaine’s site
which talked about her new book
and had the first chapter online
which mentioned the connection of musical tones to colors
and how that is evidenced in the chakra system
which made me think . . .
Connection. Colors. Tones. Energy centers. Emotion.
So I wrote a poem about the color of anger.
Can’t you see I’m working?
The Internet test said “write down the name of someone you associate with the color red.”
I put my father, of course, because everyone knows that red is angry.
Poor red. So maligned.
Some anger is brown.
Deeply rooted, earthy, quiet,
smoldering like the bubbling brew under the Hawaiian Islands.
Some is green.
Nurtured at the hands of others, growing, jealous, victim-anger.
Some is frightened, paranoid, unworthy.
Yellow.
Whatever color anger – and I’ve had a rainbow – it’s definitely not all red.
But that’s still the color of my father.
His anger is of the fire-engine variety.
Hot, spreading, fueled by anything in its path, inflicting damage.
I click to the next screen of the Internet test.
It says, “The person you associate with red is the person you love the most.”
I feel deep, midnight, black-like blue spill down over my head like a cracked egg
and turn navy, then cobalt, then azure, then cornflower, then baby.
I don’t think any anger is blue.
Deb Moore 