Raccoon, bread, apple by Bink


Unless I am speaking of meat,
which I mostly don’t,
the very word owns its ness,
as in,
what is tender
evokes tenderness,
and what calls that forth in me
is that which I am drawn towards,
or s/he whom I draw close,
or want to.

Draw close,touch,
be connected with, and to—
it’s like a song whose notes
sidle up beside each other
and seem happily married,
or a poem that dances
word to word,
meant to be silken,
not rough and chopped
like this one.


Decades ago, as a young mother, I joined a playgroup with the odd name of Warmlines. I was lonely in my complete consummation with motherhood, and with my baby. The group name continued to strike me as odd, until recently.

I am thinking of the people in my awareness that are hurting, that are celebrating, that are lonely, and tired, and scared. There are mothers whose adult children have complex special needs ( like my Bink) , and they are trying to hold their ground in choppy waters, and I so get this and I feel connected to their pain. There is the friend from a writing group who has recently been diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. I’ve never met her in person, but she is a sister of the pen. I can only hold her image in my heart, and pour small offerings of caring into her hands, her mouth, as I trek through my days. There is a friend whose brother has mental illness, and his dangerous behavior pulls something from my depths which reaches out to her. There is my dear Aunt, recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, and my beautiful friend M who mourns the loss of her mother.

On the celebratory front, my niece is blossoming in her first independent teaching job, living in her own apartment. One of my Yogabilities™ students is in a new day program, an art program for adults with disabilities that encourages her immense talent and will also market her work. My own Bink is creating rather wonderful art in an afternoon class nearby. She also began horseback riding a year ago, and she has exceeded my expectations with her interest and ability.

There are so many more, people I know online, in person, people I know of through friends or family, all dealing with the sticky stuff of life. When I think about them, I visualize myself floating in a kind of emotional outer space, connected to each of these people, who are also floating. There are slender but strong ropes growing out from my body to theirs, or perhaps they originate from each of the others and find their way to a temporary home in my heart. The ropes are purple, and there is an energy pulsing through them; the energy of connection and compassion. That’s when it hit me. Warmlines. Tentacles of caring, linking us to one another as we journey through life. So tender, so very tender.

–Melinda Coppola

Our small eyes


Perhaps nothing begins
or ends,
not exactly.

The field mouse knows
the tall grass
to be her world.

We say
morning comes,
and yet
it is always

just not in the very front
of our small eyes.

The trees are wise.
They know everything cycles,
seed to sapling,
strong trunk reaches skyward,,
and wind-felled trunk
becomes home for owl
and mushroom,
then fertilizer for forest floor.

Last night
something gentle
grasped my hand,
and I turned towards my partner
who wasn’t there.

Perhaps death
is neither end
nor beginning,
and that
which we name loss
is just a shift
beyond our modest
range of vision.

I want to think
my father came to visit,
or one of my grandmothers.
just to reassure,
just to say,
in Albanian—
which they wanted me to know—
just to say
It’s all going to be alright.


_Melinda Coppola























To Sleep, Perchance to Wake and See the Stars

Bink does not sleep solidly through the night, ever. When she was younger it was especially challenging, because she’d wake up and need me to be right there with her, and she’d often be up for hours. Sometimes, after waking at 1 or 2 am, she’d stay up the rest of the night and all through the next day. I was really tired so much of the time. Even so, there was a certain kind of mystery and grace in every aspect of my mothering journey with Bink. Still is.

Years ago I wrote this poem about the night waking. I submitted it to a few journals, and received the customary rejections that are familiar to all writers, maybe especially poets. I decided to try once more to find this poem a home. And, yay! it has just been published in the online literary journal Vitamin ZZZ. The whole journal is quite beautiful and I hope you’ll check it out. You can see it by clicking here. 

The poem:

Night Graces

Each sleep cycle you wake happy, chirping
psalm-songs into the darkness, small
warm circles of air rising from your
curled body,

and you tumble toward my bed,
proclaim morning
whether it is midnight or three or,
more thankfully, five, and I

surface from moondreams
and embrace you,
little Talitha of Ursa Major,
Gemma of Corona Borealis,
insistent beacon,
nudging my fatigue aside so
this perfect view

of the stars,
those glorious jewels of the night,

reveals itself
as the gift it is

and I,
your student, humbly bring
a glass of water.


–Melinda Coppola

Receiving the darkness

The word solstice was born from the Latin sol ( sun) and sistere ( to stand still). 


Solstice, winter

This darker interlude
could be a meditation,
a reckoning with the deceptive
nature of time.

The exacting practice
of being present

is to show up
for each round moment
as if it were everything.

This is what might save
me, or us—
the stilling to receive
each bundled particle of time,

and if we get really quiet,
and keep the flame behind
our closed lids
fixed on the darkness
before us,

we notice it is leaving
at the instant it arrives.

In truth
there is none such transition,
no arriving, no departure.

It is all a single stroke
of paint
on the mortarboard
of existence.


“ It’s all the same f—-ing day, man.” —Janis Joplin, sage disguised as an addict with a glorious set of vocal chords.

As a child, I noticed the shortened daylight only well after the length was returning to the days. Think late January in the northeast US, when the sun slips away almost a full hour later than it did when winter knocks proper on the door. Once I recognized this pattern in myself, it became metaphor for oh so many things.  If it’s mostly always getting lighter just when I notice the dark, then surely I can and will sing right through.

-Melinda Coppola





Fat on Silence


I need to write it down. I should do this before true memory fades and is replaced, as it so often is, by a recall that looks like The way I wanted it to be, or The way I think it should have been. This is what we do, being humans of great imagination and great fear. We twist and rearrange the past to suit our current longing or passion or outrage or collection of beliefs.

Here, then, is what’s left of it, the details in no order of significance. If you read it and relate, that is le cerise sur le gateau, French cherry atop French cake. I should tell you, since truth is being honored here, that writers write what first and foremost will save their sanity, which means they write for themselves, whether they tell you so, or not.

For the record, it was surgery on my dominant foot. Neither the largest reconfiguration of bone and cartilage ever, nor a mere removal of some tiny irritant. The Podiatrist called it a Big One, and said the recovery would be the hardest part. A slice was made, and ten years of free floating stuff was vacuumed out, and tattered cartilage was cut away. Bone, grown spurred and convoluted, was planed down, made smooth and then holey, ready to receive adopted titanium parts. A plate and seven screws married foot’s old bone in a ceremony of bright lights and shiny, sterile tools, officiated by a surgeon seasoned in the ways of the human foot.

It was December, and I planned as much as I could for the extended period of no weight bearing. Yes, it hurt. It was hard in all the ways you might expect, and a few you might not consider. While I was able to schedule a break of several months in my Yoga and Yogabilities™ teaching, the rest of the  process was quite complicated by my role as primary caregiver to Bink, my adult daughter with special needs. But it’s the afterwards I concern myself with here.

After the first week or so, I got used to needing assistance with many activities of daily living. Superguy began to adapt to doing the chores and errands and caregiving that typically make up a good chunk of my days. As I stabilized, he felt freer to leave the house for longer periods of time. I had some visitors, but there were lots and lots of spaces in my days, stretches with no people, or very few of them.

I’m an introvert by nature, and the intensity of my care giving experience tends to add extra appreciation for solitude and quiet. I’ve never been one to shy away from being alone. That said, I’d also never had weeks of enforced couch time in a very quiet house. When Bink was at her day program and Superguy was off at work, I had hours and hours of time and space.

I read. I watched the collection of home shows I record on a regular basis. House Hunters International is my only mode of world travel, after all! I did some art, and wrote a bit. After some time I was also able to wheel myself clumsily around the house on my nifty knee scooter, but most of my time was spent sitting.

I resisted it at first, and spent a little time feeling sorry for myself. The magic—and I can’t call it anything less— began to manifest slowly, and only when I allowed myself to surrender into this lifestyle. I required the acceptance that my primary vocation for a while would be healing.

It’s taken me many months to write about this, and I am still struggling for the best words to convey the transcendent experience I had while I was confined to my house for those few months last winter.

In Yoga tradition, we all contain five bodies of life force that nest inside each other. The layers are made of increasingly finer grades of energy. During my couch sitting weeks, it was as if the edges of my energy bodies spread and became more porous. All that activity I was so used to, had been keeping my energy confined to a certain size and shape. When the structure of my life fell away, the collection of energies known as me began to expand, and in the process, I welcomed a deep peace to trickle into my being. It became flood, the landscape altering kind, unlike anything I’ve ever known.

This was a peace that needs a new name, like superpeace or hypercalm. It settled over me like the softest blanket, lightweight but warm enough to melt the frozen places in my heart and soul that hadn’t seen sunlight in years. The hours of silence and solitude were nourishing some bits of my insides that I didn’t even know existed. In circumstances that I thought would drive me nuts, I found a state of deeply serene acceptance, a wild form of being present that went beyond meditation. I didn’t realize the extent of the effect until I was exposed to the outside world again.

After weeks of confinement, the only exception being follow up visits to the foot doctor, my Superguy and I decided I could go out of the house on a little field trip. He helped me into a portable wheelchair we’d acquired to get me to and from the house for said appointments. We went down the street to Panera bread for a cup of tea.

I am not exaggerating when I tell you my senses were bombarded with haphazard grenades of color, light and noise. It was jarring, to put it mildly. I’d lost touch with how loud and chaotic and abrasive the sights and sounds, textures and energies of the cars and clerks and crowds are. I remember actually recoiling at the store signs and the speed with which all those tires on the roads kicked out snow and gravel. And the pace! Frenetic, dizzying. I was exhausted after that first outing.

Subsequent outings had similar but very gradually more muted effects on me. When I was finally able to drive again and I began doing all the things I’d been relieved of for so long, I vowed I would hold on to the peaceful state I’d been gifted through my convalescence. It faded, though. The figurative leap back into the busy swirl of my life demanded my focus and energy. I’m sad to say that I felt myself contract again, fitting back in to the expectations that my life before the big surgery was modeled upon.

I’ve not forgotten my experience, though. I’ll call this somewhat inadequate attempt to convey it to you a victory, because I’ve resisted even trying to explain this for so long.

A few years back, I wrote the following on one of my Yoga Facebook pages:

“There is a quality of fullness in silence, in emptiness, in spaces. Spaces nourish and soothe and spaces can heal. The space between sentences, between breaths. Space between footsteps and activities and thoughts. The space to be, the space to be with, the space to do small things well.”

Today I kneel before the transformational power of experiences we may dread and avoid. I bow to the possibilities that exist within the fullness of emptiness, and I testify to the immense importance of spaces between things.


–Melinda Coppola





Rocking the cosmic swirl


It comforts me to know the old
couple across the street
just celebrated fifty years

in the same house. Fifty together years
with the home they perhaps chose
to be new in together,
a threesome of sorts,
their bodies joining brick
and hardened earth
settling and cracking
and pressing together,

adding more spackle
and grout
and laughter

with a child, then three more,
adding rooms
to contain the growing
and the mirth
and the tears
of those who were
now gone.

When my soul grows weary
traversing tightropes—
such fast-paced, overloaded,
know-too-much times—
I look across the street,

to the wise and wizened pair
who are ever so busy
slowly rocking, in their old chairs,
on the porch,

and it consoles me to witness them,
soothes me to consider
the old ways of houses
and their people,
and the history of aged dwellings anywhere,
the ways these wood and stone
talismans seem to lean into
a wind or two that can elicit creaks,
groans even,

and their occupants
maybe know
they are being held up
by sagging floorboards
and crumbling plaster,
and the roof is losing shingles
fast as hairs on their heads,

yet they rock, and nod,
and smile
as if to say

where are you rushing to,
and don’t you know
all things fall apart.
We do, too,

so why not sit awhile,
give the swirling
sediment of your ancestors,
and the greening pollen
that falls from the trees
like stardust in the daytime,
a place to land.

See how the wind marries the light,
begets little particles of evidence
that you’re alive,
that others have been, too,
and ragweed and dander,
detritus of the whole cosmic swirl,

touch down on your arms,
have little dances
before they settle there.


–Melinda Coppola





Being present is easy when the blue sky moment is trimmed with green grass, when temperate breezes blow your hair back gently from your bright, clean face. You can hop off the worry train quickly in such minutes and hours. You can drop your baggage carelessly to the ground without so much as a glance towards where it lands, and feel your sneakered feet happy on some surface that may or may not be level. You can take the world and yourself exactly as it is, you are.

It’s jumping off in the dark that’s tricky, first opening your chest and reaching in deep for your courage and the faith that you’ll be welcomed by some surface, that you won’t fall and keep falling into some gaping chasm that opened in the earth while you were busy regretting and planning and being all sorts of things except grateful.

When the moment you are living in, the only one you have (which is all any of us have, ever), is a really shitty one by most measures, because you’re watching someone you love deeply (say, your child) suffer, and you can’t fix it, being present doesn’t feel like any gift you want to accept graciously, or at all.

We can know what we know, you and I, about the transient nature of pretty much everything; how all things pass and we are just temporary sculptures made of bits of stars and dust from dinosaur bones and the dreams of our ancestors. We can know all this and still want to do almost anything but be with the most painful parts of our existence.

And yet.

And yet, in time and over days colorful or washed out, through dark, thick nights and between joy sandwiched by crusty miseries, our capacity to sit with it all increases. It might be imperceptible for a long, long time, and then one day you mirror gaze and your jaw drops. There it is, your shiny heart, visible right through your tender skin, and it’s drumbeating and voluptuous, stretched out by all the exercise of crying and breathing and laughing and coping. It’s huge, in fact, and strong enough to hold you and everyone you care about, and even a few you don’t. Right about then you might remember that you’ve made it through absolutely everything so far, and even the thorniest ground doesn’t feel quite like a match for your deceptively tough lower body. Then you sit right there in that moment, and maybe you don’t feel tempted to pretend to be elsewhere at all.

And so.

And so you get up in the morning and pour a hot cup of something like tea. You drop in soy milk that turns the tannic liquid the color of hope. You wake your kid, even if she’s been up ten times in the night, and begin. You begin because it’s the only real choice, and maybe this day you stick around for more of the moments than you did the day before. You don’t zone out as much, or numb yourself as often. You don’t project, or regret, or try to edit what hasn’t even been written yet. You face what arises without censure, because you know and keep knowing you’re strong and wise and sober enough to sit or stand or slow dance with any given moment, be intimate with it, and then let it
let it
let it

–Melinda Coppola


So many ways to say it. Be Here Now.







Opening the red door to a new spring day.
my feet greet crumbs of last year’s leaves,
dotted with recent, light green pollen
all swirled into the little cove, entry
that guides me into and from
this place, this home,

and they rattle a brittle kind of music
together, new and old,
crunchy and soft,
before I even lift a sneakered foot
across the threshold.

There it is—a word, a season, a sound;
threshold, May, music,
and my mind goes to all the beginnings;
friends welcoming grandchildren,
my niece with a new Master’s degree,
and last eve, baby bunnies
shaped like promise
against the lovely, later dusk
in the front yard.

A poem, a sign,
seasons bumping up against
each other, and my mind
goes to all the endings;
one woman struggling with reason
in the wake of her husband’s suicide,
another, across the world, daily grieving
her young daughter,
who would be nearly eight now,
taken by a disease deemed too rare
to fund research for a cure.

Endings, beginnings, the seasons
tireless with their lesson plans,
and somewhere between
the celebrants
and mourners,
the rest of us keep forgetting
to be alive while we live,

and the wind keeps
reminding us—
breathe, breathe,
this too shall pass,
you too,

so be urgent with this
moment, press your face
into the grass,
let the musky earth
fill your senses,

get dirty
get wet,
leave the laundry
for another day.


-Melinda Coppola

Your Repose

I’m pleased to share this poem, which made its debut yesterday, in the Songs of Eretz Poetry Journal. I’ve included my poet’s notes, which that particular editor requires, as well as his comments. I’m grateful to add another poem to my list of published  work. I’m also thankful for the support of my dear readers!


Your Repose

The dream stage, when the eyes dance
beneath closed lids,
that which we know as REM,
is also named paradoxical sleep,
because the body rests while the mind
is quite awake.

I wonder if your soul
checks herself in mirrors
as you slumber, scrolls
Facebook, idly clicking Likes
with her ethereal fingers,
as if this tiny dreamland act,
the flick of a mouse,
could change a lifetime’s course.

You, who walk the waking world
following all the rules you know,
making up some you don’t,
doing everything in order,
trying to make sense of the chaos,

You who counts duplicates;
numbers on license plates,
yellow cars in a lot,
who checks and rechecks
the solid fences of her world:
I will have a treat,
You’re a girl,
You will have girl hair when we leave,
Two sides, cheek bink,
Mommy can you fix it

I want to think you are free in sleep,
different, unconstrained,
that anxiety and compulsion,
autism and obsessions
can’t follow you
when you fly to that misty realm.

I want to think
you can have this respite every night,
relief from all the voices, and fears,
the tensions, demands,
that there is no standard
of normal in dreamland,
or, if there is, you define it,
you abide
quite comfortably there.

–Melinda Coppola

Poets Notes:  I often wish I could be inside my developmentally disabled daughter’s brain. The mystery of her inner landscape intrigues me as much as the mystical realm of sleep and dreams. This poem was conceived from my loving curiosity about the nighttime journeys of her mind and soul.


Editor’s Note( From Songs of Eretz Poetry Review):  The gradual turn that begins in the third stanza is nicely done, perfectly setting up the reader for the narrative of the autistic girl in her dream world.  The heartfelt wish at the close of the poem takes my breath away.


Find a link to the original poetry journal posting, by clicking HERE

Many Singularities







Stephen Hawking,
having passed away
a full fifty one years
post predicted demise,

has left us trails,
Not random,
because nothing is
haphazard as it seems.

Rather they are beaded,
strung together
on some
holographic ribbon
run through holes
patterned in multiverses
of black velvet,

and I’m already poeming
a proposal
that each patient,
upon a presumed life
shortening diagnosis,

be presented with
Stephen’s curriculum vitae
for good measure,
a collection of verse­­,
(the non-rhyming kind),

to further impeach
the arrogance
that moves mere mortals
to issue proclamations
of allotted time,

as if anyone could ensconce
one star from its constellation,
give it nothing to reflect
back or upon,
and foretell its singular light
in years.

Stephen, leaving breadcrumbs,
round clues to square
the life he left behind—
two wives, three children,
a dozen maps with two sided arrows
pointing to where
we came from, where
we might go,
a dummies guide to
how to flourish
despite, or with, or even because of,

also left a hundred doors
open to the curious among us,
which should mean everyone,

and he gave language
to the way an atheist sparks
a deeper appreciation of God.

It’s all in how you label it;
accident, plan,
gift, curse

it’s all up for grabs in a universe
where everything is sacred
or nothing is.

Melinda Coppola

What is the definition of a poet? I think we are interpreters of everyday sights and sounds and interactions, enabling more people to experience the sheer miracles that surround us and live within us. Stephen Hawking grasped things most could never comprehend, yet his named theories and observations captivated millions. He was a brilliant physicist, yet also a poet in his own way.