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Best Poems Written by Nola Perez

Below are the all-time best Nola Perez poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Easter Ivy

It's used as an afterthought, fattening festive 
arrangements for Mother's Day, Easter, 
someone's birthday.  An underrated vine,
enhancing center-stage flowers whose star-power 
doesn't wear well. It's the "coming attraction" 
that's there after the clapping dies down, 
replanted by doorstep or gravestone.  "Grow," 
I say, "Change my life with your traveling beauty, 
your common denominator, your scrawling 
signature seldom sought for autographs.

Snaking around graves at our family plot, 
it's an ongoing gift, out-giving the giver 
with its "overwhelming darkness", reminding us 
where there is life, there is also death. Surviving, 
thriving in hanging pots the less hardy exit,
it surprises and delights, reaching down from limbs
of trees for soil, unchallenged there in pine straw 
until tender tendrils insinuate their way 
to daylight through tapestries of needles

When the ivy becomes dense, I will know 
you are there: ivy of my heart, ivy of essence, 
the graceful way it swings and sways, how 
it takes to new habitat in the way you, Julie, 
cut a swath through New York City after lifetimes 
in the easy South.  We are old souls, older 
than the hedera, cousin to ginseng, reminder 
of the movement of the heavens, the ability 
to bring things together.  You were shelter, 
the poets' headpiece, bringing peace 
to my household.  Resurrection and rebirth, 
Julie, in this Easter of ivy.

Details | Nola Perez Poem

Fig Tree, New Year's Day

Our fig in January, entirely denuded now
like my heart in your absence, is but
more beautiful, if possible, in its seasonal
solemnity than in summer's exacting extravagance.
The trunk, grown massive in manhood, is a citadel
of strength supporting the curving bowl of its
branches as they bend back into themselves, becoming
the bare black sculpture of winter trees Hemingway
described in Paris in the Jardin of Luxembourg
where we used to walk, following in his footsteps.

These prayerful branches, grown as large as
the beanstalk giant of storybook lore, cup
the sky, making a sieve through which rain filters,
better for unobstructed passage to its 
earthbound blessing, clearer for the distillation.

Above ground two massive roots, more visible
in winter definition--veins from the beating heart
of the tree--though siblings still, sprawl out 
in different directions, then disappear wherever
they are traveling,  who knows where?  Not
climbing skyward like Jack on his leafy ladder, 
but earthward out of sight toward a Southern
provenance, toward Provence, perhaps, 
as if impassioned for home.
       

      HAPPY NEW YEAR FELLOW SOUPERS!

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Seeing Things

January & February this year, 
prescription lenses lost. I count
the cost (it cost me dear).

A place for everything
and everything in its place,
my grandmother said,

but I only know 
where my glasses are
when they're on my face.

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The Sisterhood of the Ziploc

Starving a fever, 
stuffing a cold I'm following 
happily that old 
advice: pumpkin pie, 
coconut cake, excellent 
for easing any ache. 
O Chochona!, it's pneumonia,
so much chicken soup 
from friends in the coop, 
dark and white, breast 
and leg have me almost 
ready to lay an egg.

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What the Wind Is Doing

It's rocking an empty flowerpot perched
in a pine tree:  'RockABye Baby in the High Top,'
its contents shell shocked in this February 
of zero wind chill.  It's the heart's empty nest,  
cold ripple of a lake that threatens to overtake, 
were it not for higher ground. We've wind
from the northeast, sharp and heartless, 

harbinger of storms, but I am Barrier Island, 
formed by one who taught me by salt, sea-
shell, and the sting of sand, bitter winter spray 
in remembered summer. Land bound, 
one learns to light where something shores us.  
So here am I , despite trade winds, the Skull
and Bones of picturesque pirates, failed 
story tales where even the wind lies. 

In the lake one small duck, sustained by 
its currents paddles my direction, drawn 
by intuition or design of a kindred spirit who 
would sail, dive with delight, endure 
the cold solitude of seagulls at evening, 
seeking harbor far from their ocean.  
They are white flags signaling Yes, 
You will find your heaven.

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Poetry Saved Me

If it hadn't been for poetry
what would I have done
with all those cliffs
I almost jumped off of--
with all the riffs
in the music of my life
I couldn't seem
to get enough of.
With all the passion
I imagined I couldn't
live without.  Poetry
was the place I passed up
the junctions I might
have chosen otherwise,
when Wise had nothing
to do with it.  You can 
be sure of it: Poetry
saved my life.

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Blue

Blue Rivers
On Your Hands
Infections, Convections
Connections
Severed.

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At the Beach With Elizabeth

I wish my granddaughter paper dolls:
"Princess Elizabeth and Margaret Rose,"
circa 1940s.  I wish her pick-up sticks
of rainbow colors, or a rubber ball,
Say, and its metallic jacks.  I

wish her a Monopoly board, lots
of property---rows of dominoes
as black as the hearts 
of those bad boys who ran away.  "I wish, 
I wish, with all my heart," says E.

with wave of good witch 
Glinda's starry wand, while I ask 
Bring Elizabeth back 
that heartless pack who 
would not let her play.

Details | Nola Perez Poem

Day of the Dead

"Dia de Los Muertos", the Spanish name it.  Eve
of All Saints, saw we of the church of blessed assurance
of an observance ushering in fall while easing
our multilingual obsession with death.  The sun shines
on unmarked graves, and, "Come winter the same
snow falls, dusting us all," so it is said, and so
honored at The Dollar Tree Store.

Weeks before Halloween, when punctilious roadside tents
fill with demonic orange grins, when what the French
call The Season of Color with its 'sturm und drang' roars
in, I push past the doors of The Dollar Tree.  No
automatic entry ushers us in, no Pearly Gates swing
wide to celestial Muzak.  We come to purchase the needs
of the living-- tinfoil, plastic bags, detergent: a limpid purple
liquid with its cautionary "Do Not Drink," its "Fragrancia
Duradera."  Longevity, one dollar a bottle.

Shelves of seasonal gimcracks stack up at the entrance.
"Adornes" in your face, useless for extending time:
crows with real feathers, spectral spider webs, glittery 
black skulls, mockup tombstones inscribed "Rest in 
Pieces"--Do Not Disturb-- Don't Laugh, You're Next. 
I laugh, anyway.  Comics know reality is funny.

All Hallows Eve a year ago, our parish priest 
stood in cemetery darkness at a rude stone altar, 
celebrating Mass at Bosque Bello, our Beautiful Forest 
of flashlights and  luminaries.  There among graves 
of the known and unknown, we broke bread and 
shared the cup of blood, there, where the blessed dead 
settle deep in their shoe-boxes, and the not-yet-
unmasked confront certain demise.

Details | Nola Perez Poem

Eulogy For Frank

My father died prematurely while away on 
a business trip from a rogue blood clot to the heart  
I never doubted he loved me, would have liked me, 
(not the same thing), adult to adult, provided I 
was not too strong a woman for him.  He was difficult-- 
a Henry VIII of the times, two divorces, a first wife 
we never knew, one from my mother when I was six, 
then heated voices from their bedroom with a third, 
heard in darkness beyond my door, hands over my ears.  
But, he was DADDY. the god-like person who emceed 
his daughter's birthdays, planned games, gave out prizes, 
while a backstage stepmom provided cake.  Cake 
mistress, fond father.  Thus, I learned to turn to men.

Tennessee Williams wrote, "My sister was quicker
at everything than I."  I was like that, maybe not quicker 
than my brothers, but quick to fall in love with cities,
objects, water anywhere: tide pools, oceans, rivers,
mountain streams, stately geese, lake ducks in queues,
the vermillion of winter sunsets, purity of cumulus 
in a summer sky, the scarlet flash of a cardinal from tree 
to tree.  Good luck, always, but with bad luck, I always 
fell in love with impossible men, ones who left me, or I left 
them.  The husband who stayed? He was the true one.  
Then, there was Mr. K, my high school principal, a dead ringer 
for Thomas Wolfe, with whom the girl I was must have
thought she could go home again.  His costume
"de rigueur" was a rumpled white shirt, black trousers
splayed with chalk dust, coal black hair, and an imposing
presence no one took issue with, maybe not even his
British wife, teaching English in the same school.

I sent him my poems by a classmate to his office, too shy 
to deliver  them myself.  Years later, "Poetry mash notes,"
a colleague said, inciting laughter in a poetry audience with 
whom I shared my youthful infatuation, the energy lingering 
long after he signed my graduation diploma, because Yes, 
he read my poems, and Yes, I sat dazzled in his English Lit 
class to "Beowulf," "Chaucer," and the Shakespeare plays we
took turns reading aloud.  When he chose another to read
Portia instead of me, "for her gentle voice," I was devastated,
yet when a boy spoke out in class to criticize my poems:
"No one can understand what she writes," Mr. K. replied 
"On the contrary, she writes about very complex things with 
very simple language."  This praise never left me.

Years after, moving to Atlanta with my husband and small
children, our paths crossed again.  Living there 
at the same time, Mr. K. and I found each other in an 
Episcopal parish, its satisfying high-church "smells and bells" 
the only show in town, "Spiky," his wife said.  There, our
friendship deepened, until Mr. K. moved to England with his wife, 
she returning home to complete the cycle, finish out the years 
at point of origin. We do go home again, Thomas Wolfe not-
withstanding, as did I, seeking toward close of life 
the comfort and substance of birthplace.

Mr. K. returned occasionally to Atlanta for a visit with his son.
He would call me, and it was then that we met for dinner,
most often at Zazu's an intimate bar and restaurant on Peachtree.  
What did we talk about sitting across a table from each other?
I do not now remember, but once I observed him glancing at
his aging hands and comparing them to mine, younger by a few,
completely irrelevant years.  I once asked him as he entered
his later years if he ever felt "old."  He said No, he felt the same
as he always had.  This was a revelation: I imagined people 
felt as old inside as they looked.  This is not the case, as 
I was to discover in my own lifetime.

On one evening I did not know would be the last time, Mr. K.
and I sat in my car in darkness after dinner in front of his son's
house.  As he prepared to leave, he said, "I don't know how I shall
get along without you, though I've been without you all these
years.  We never touched, save in the bond of friendship, and more's 
the pity.  Some time passed.  I wrote a letter to Mr. K.and his wife.  
It was returned unopened with a message on the envelope, 
"Both deceased."  In my car, then, that last night, it was Adieu -- 
To God, not Au Revoir.  Now, with "All time, all attitudes washing 
away," as I wrote in a poem called "Fernandina," he lives 
in the room in the heart where no one enters but me.
No need for a phone call.  I hold the key.