Category Archives: Spring

Poem for My Wife

What I Say to You After Work: for Naomi
  
  
It’s just a bad day, Darlin.
There have been others before this 
and we’re still here, still breathing, still 
waking up in the morning to do it all over again.
I know. I know it has to get better. It will. 
Let’s go for a walk 
and look at the maples in our neighborhood 
budding their fresh green leaves, 
shedding the whirlygigs 
with their veined helicopter wings.
Let’s feel the warming spring Kansas breeze 
on our faces, let it tousle our hair 
like a busy mother’s touch. 
Let’s leave the smart phones 
and music players at home. 
Let’s talk out the frustrations 
and the humiliations and the fuckups.
Let’s talk about planting flowers and tomatoes, 
playing guitars, grilling, inviting friends over, 
getting out of the house. Let’s stop at the corner
where the redbud ignites against the greening grass.
Let’s curse the dandelions but enjoy the yellow. 
Let’s give the bad day the attention it deserves, 
which, really, 
  
ain’t much. 

© 2019 by Shawn Pavey
 

Here’s What People are Saying About My Latest Book

“The poems in Shawn Pavey’s Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6 examine the seasons in the author’s life, broken down into days and then into moments, whether it’s a warm Kansas City wind, drinking on 39th Street, or a moment of quiet contemplation filled with the uncertainty that comes with just being alive in the 21st century. Pavey’s poems are straight and honest, taking the time to just live now and put it all down on paper, something that the rest of us usually put off until tomorrow. His words are as spare as bone, leaving the wind and taking nothing for granted.” John Dorsey, author of Appalachian Frankenstein

“Shawn Pavey’s poems capture the longing we feel when we lift the needle from a record album. In the turntable’s wishwiswish between Stratocaster riffs, there lies hope and resignation, Bruce Springsteen and hungry cats, maple leaves and ‘plastic blasted into space.’ Pavey’s poems give voice to our hunger for life, a medieval song heard through 21st Century earbuds.” Al Ortolani, author of Francis Shoots Pool at Chubb’s Bar and Waving Mustard in Surrender.

“In Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6, I was reminded of how a gifted poet like Shawn Pavey doesn’t try to convince his readers to have things we don’t need but to slyly persuade us to open our eyes to the presence of the treasure of those things we cannot live without. In this book we have love, surprise, death, angels and more pictured for us in a flow of language both ordinary and extraordinary gracing us with a dancing vocabulary’s most lyrical and unforgettable choreography.” Chuck Sullivan, author of Zen Matchbook and Alphabet of Grace.

Spring is Around The Corner

Thaw

In winter, the body knows
it is born to vanish.

Flesh turns to dirt, bones
wash white in March rains.
Life churns, returning
to wet layers of earth.

We – dead and dying, rotten and rotting –
look up to a sun far away and wait,
wait for the body and the solar body
to pull each other closer,
moisten skin with sweat,
heat blood,
crack seeds,
green the dead husk of the world.

In spring, the body knows
it is born to sing.

Previously published in the Winter 2011 issue of The Main Street Rag Literary Journal.
© 2011 by Shawn Pavey. All rights reserved.