Christineporeba's comments (member since Feb 10, 2009)

Christineporeba's comments from the ¡ POETRY ! group.

A lovely grouping of poems. good luck to all!

Hi Everyone. I just wanted to clarify. I have not been writing nice comments about myself. I accidentally forwarded a link that signed people in as me. ooops. Thank you to all who have voted for me and said nice things. All I can say is, aw shucks.

I vote for:
How to Hear Tortillas

by—Christine Poreba
THANKS! A wonderful poem!!!!

Christine Poreba has my vote

How to Hear Tortillas


Set them softly in a sink,
wet like ground
where the wheat grew.
Do not fold or fill.
Let rest a while
beside a door
the color of midnight
with a scene
of desert or tunnel,
el patio
scripted in an arc
above a mariachi,
painted hatless
and barefoot
with a guitar slung
on his back
as he crosses the surface
that stands
between
two places. Here,
the tortillas
will begin to curl
a little
at their edges;
baste lightly
with oiled leaves
and set uncovered
until a well forms
in their centers.
Listen, then,
for a prickled sound
of hidden cacti
calling the singer home.

First Garden


Bending over soil in the spring
with my new mother-in-law,
planting two rows of sunflowers
and three of corn, it comes to me—
that the words wedding and weeding
are only a letter apart,

that I’ve never been in charge
of a garden, or even been good
at remembering to water
plants inside, to keep them
where they’d get the light
they needed.

I think of my mother, mornings
in a new country setting,
so content to be nestled among rows
of blossoming asparagus,
her blue starchy gloves tearing up
each slender green invader by its roots.

She liked to say she was
cleaning what she could;
unlike my father’s mounds
of newspapers, office chairs
found on sidewalks, this was
a mess she could control.

When my mother-in-law and I
step back from the faceless garden,
and she says, ‘Ok, now grow!’
her palms in giddy fists, I feel
the charge of this, the hand I’ll need
to give to tidy this little patch of
things that might be about to happen.

by Christine Poreba