Eileen Moeller: "Dear Ezra"

I have to confess:
there are abstractions
I no longer go in fear of.

Take loneliness.
I've started calling it solitude.
It feels so new and improved now,
I can honestly say it soaks up time
better than a sponge soaks up water.

The other day I actually washed this poem with it.

Ez, let me tell you,
aging is a Laundromat,
and eventually you find yourself
watching what you spurned
and dreaded for years
spread out in widening gyres,
like sheets fluffed in the dryer.

Life is quite a bit cozier
when you let all the bugaboos—
you know—say, sadness and fear
crawl into bed with you.

Pace them with your breathing
and they fall asleep
fast as a couple of kids.

The other night we huddled together
staring at the moon
as it slid past my window:
big-bellied sail on a wet black sea.

"Dear Ezra" by Eileen Moeller. Text as published in Poems of Awakening: An International Anthology of Spiritual Poetry, edited by Betsy Small (Outskirts Press, 2011). It was also published on And So I Sing: Poems and Iconography, the poet's blog. Reprinted here by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Remedios folds a sheet at the laundromat on 47th Street," photograph by Jon Lowenstein, part of a series entitled "From Guerrero to Gringolandia and Back: Day Labor, Family, the New Global Economy."