Category: death and other endings

august

On By ©️K.T. 2025In August, death and other endings, phenology, Poem, poetry, starling, timeLeave a comment

say something about August.

well,

it sweats and sticks
then is gone too quick
just when you begin to tolerate it;

if Sunday Scaries were 31 days in a row;

a sudden carpeting of yellow leaves on green grass — current fall rate: 1 leaf per minute —my instrumentation: a pair of 5+decades-old eyes;

there will be no prolific fruiting on the two black walnut trees this year — and i am guilty with a schaudenfreude regarding the red squirrels;

the starlings stack the power lines and camouflage themselves in the green tree tops
this, a rest stop in their annual migration

those synchronized swimmers of atmosphere,
a singular heartbeat, a murmuration, of hundreds of individuals, these beautiful communists.

i have become invested with the observation and documentation of phenology:

i expected them this week.

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unalike

On By ©️K.T. 2025In death and other endings, dirt road chronicles, Epigenetic, Mother, Poem, poetry, relationships, womb, womenLeave a comment

the golden salmon sky beckons
before the orange orb emerges and the blue arrives
i call you to the glass doors for the eastern view
but you move with an intentional, sabotaging slowness,
without the respect, the urgency
that ephemeral light and beauty require of us

that’s just one difference between me and you,
i am keeping watch, i stay ready for some thing holy,

and you, you clock-watch for the mundane:
for the mail, for dr. phil, a rush only to ever get “it” all over with — the chore, the trip, the holiday, the ceremony, the meal, the dishes, even the damn dessert and bedtime prayer /

nothing ever truly experienced — or savored by you

save for your anger, your resentment,
and that ever-lasting gobstopper of hate, that you nurse in your cheek, its bitterness, sourness, leaching down into,

embalming, your still-living heart

how did i be-come me with you as a mother?

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waiting for the bough to break

On By ©️K.T. 2025In author, autobiographical, crone chronicles, death and other endings, december, dirt road chronicles, earthlings, endings, Essay, flora, Gaza, Genocide, grief, kin, Life and Death, liminality, mortality, Palestine, plant beings, Reverence, threshold, time, Tree, Trees, writerLeave a comment

i am waiting for the bough to break — or, to be severed by proxy at my behest.

earlier this week on my daily walk-about, i noticed that a primary limb, the major artery, on a nearly 80’ tall and likely nearing 100 years-old, elm tree on the land i occupy, had cleaved and that the fracture was migrating down into the trunk — and dangerously so.

i don’t know the cause: if it was the abrupt shift in temperature to freezing here in southwest Michigan — or, if the tree was stressed from a standing-water-wet spring followed by a very dry summer, or if “it” is simply at the end of their life — all the elms here had unusually held onto an abundance of their prolific leaves until the fourth week of November.

no matter.

the matters:

the massive limb of the elm stretches high and precariously over the old barn, and depending on the wind direction, there’s a chance if it falls, it could clip the back of my house or take the whole tree down with it.

i await the tree surgery & removal crew. i am at their and the northerly and westerly gusts’ mercy.

in the meantime, i have also been wrestling with the possible choice of whether to have the crew amputate just the cleaved limbs — if the tree is in fact salvageable — or, to remove the entire tree at once instead of forestalling the inevitable.

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institutional knowledge

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Crone, Crone Consciousness, Death, death and other endings, endings, Estrangement, Family, friendship, grief, kin, mourningLeave a comment

another part of mourning, an enduring part of mourning:

the loss of the “institutional knowledge” of you that they alone held, documented and archived;

when

a life-long, childhood or early adulthood friend

a beloved mother, or grandmother, or father,

a harmonious sibling, a close cousin

a long-time lover,

a partner in a long marriage, officiated — or not

a child whom you birthed or raised and who may have also birthed or raised you, have mercy.

when, those relationships become one-sided through death — or other endings,

not only are they gone,

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