06 Monday Feb 2023
Mud’s come
but you wouldn’t know it
until your foot is three inches deep.
Or, god forbid, your tire by far more.
That’s the thing about this place–
dry as the brown cracked skin lining the arroyos
but a certain season arrives
and the steady, hard, rocky road you’ve trusted
decides to gulp you and whatever force is moving you along
straight into its earthen gullet.
I can understand that kind of gluttony.
Maybe it’s best I slow down and prison-break my shoe.
03 Friday Feb 2023
Tyranny over self,
Tyranny over body,
Tyranny over the Land.
Carve mountainsides, slash prairies, pollute valleys, hate,
hate and control, cellulite, humps, wrinkles, and jiggles.
Hide and hate, turn upon the landscape inner,
the landscape outer–
one and the same.
Within this domination resides
everlasting distraction from the rhythmic pulsing
of our own heart’s rivers.
In service to the status quo.
As Earth’s waters are Life,
our blood is Life.
Break the shaming silence–the waterways know
to indulge their curves, bumps, and depths
singing praises through movement,
of tree roots, reflected sky, grating rocks
and wriggling fish.
We have only so long to celebrate and dance
our one beloved Body:
Skip the contempt useful to maintaining outdated ways.
Jump straight into dark waters full
of more Beauty than any one lifetime can hold.
20 Thursday Oct 2022
Posted in approaching, beauty, poems, poetry, return
≈ Comments Off on Singing through dawn
Coyote’s been singing through dawn,
calling sun back
from behind the mountain with quivering jaw.
She sounds young,
experimenting with her prowess.
Golden locust leaves hang silently, cold,
awaiting their restful drop.
The pale grasses sing too,
while sagebrush sustains Earth’s bass notes.
Turning of a new day can hold us,
more steadily than any mother..
we need only remember.
13 Monday Dec 2021
The storm is making noisy mouths of the shingles this morning,
and pom-poms of the pine’s branches.
Rain beads the panes,
droplets meet socially, gather in their weight
and river down, down towards wet ground.
A limy glow. Needles sticking long on fence, on chair,
all throughout lavender’s hair.
Yesterday at this time crows were dancing in sunrise light,
pink orange, sorbet swirl of clouds,
save one:
She sat still atop a black fir, staring.
Our four eyes, in settled bodies, soaked in the welcoming arms
of our rising Sun–
now, She knows how to begin a day.
15 Thursday Jul 2021
All the unacceptable parts of you
you catapulted into the junk drawer as a child
the moment someone you loved
clearly didn’t approve,
they don’t belong there.
Try singing them back out of the dark.
Back into you.
The best sauces dance on the tongue with
their rightful bloom of spice and vigor.
24 Thursday Jun 2021
Today is the wagging tail of a red squirrel,
and an open door.
It doesn’t close now, outside being home,
inside being a storage place.
Yesterday two hummingbirds chased hawk,
funny youngster learning her way,
an iridescent green-backed fly sat still
at the center of a jasmine flower
and I laughed in the toppled, strong arms of a ten year old,
who pushes me always to the floor loving
every taboo body part and happening of hers
as she, too, learns her way.
In the tumbly, bumbly flight lessons
of the two towhees
I witness a desire to enter through the propped door
after hopping the limits of the garden perimeter,
speaking confusion and discovery.
Here, together, the sky-reaching cypresses,
the eucalyptus bird hotel
and the sweeping vultures,
all of us, we are finding our way;
some heavier with faith and knowing
bring needed weight into the feet of those
easily tousled by winds blowing hard.
What must it be to be full
each day
with relation, within the great motions,
settled during movement
and drinking in the finite, ever-renewing Beauty
at no distance at all to a single one of us?
04 Thursday Jun 2020
A big moment arrives,
likely without your (intentional) bidding,
when no Golden Key arrives.
You swear you aren’t looking for one,
assure others you know there isn’t one,
and yet?
Yet, when you open that door
none appears.
And everything comes up short.
Where is your way through?
Surely, following such pain and strife,
with the endless effort and hope,
some
Thing
will
raise its head and wag a greeting
of arrival.
Because your faith needs food.
Instead, you are told
humanity is a shithole
with moments of beauty between.
And how that isn’t trauma added
to the heartbreak is beyond you.
Because Faith needs not only Beauty
but connection.
Not unending loss
and rage,
but nutrients for the lost souls and
the begging souls who try,
try,
try
for a beautiful life founded on self-respect
and a worth unquestionable,
unquestionable by color, origin, belief,
or day alive navigating a difficult and messy
and Beautiful world.
Finding the faith within to keep on
may be the magic
all of us seek.
04 Monday Nov 2019
She pours glitter out of the glass slipper.
Ridiculous thing, sweat filled, fragile and unyielding.
With a moment’s further pause..
She hucks it and its mate straight
into the Sea.
Maybe there, in salty, living brine
they can return silica to sand,
or, at minimum, make homes
for lonely crabs looking
to entertain the holy wisdom
within their ocean-loving neighbors.
Glass slippers be damned, She mutters,
and skips off between broken waves and flattened
wet shore
simply to find her own fleshy rhythm.
Perhaps for the first time.
08 Friday Mar 2019
Got long hair?
Got any hair?
Woman, shave your head.
And collect the assumptions hoisted upon you,
the ones you weren’t quite certain,
but now you know,
have been dragging you down.
Belly scraping the road.
Woman, got long hair?
Shave your head, and learn how confused
perceptions and expectations of you
are.
Where you may have been pretty, attractive,
desired,
suddenly the sight of that is gone
and people, most people, don’t have a clue
how to respond, how to comprehend–
But you were pretty.
You were attractive.
You were desirable.
Watch them turn their eyes away, unable
to look at you.
Hear them,
hating what they see and can’t understand,
say, “You look so…different.”
The least offensive, yet unasked for, comment
they can make.
Woman, got long hair?
Shave your head,
and discover what assumptions shove you low, in place,
a shallow ditch where you have been put.
Some react in adoration,
others with titillation, however briefly,
or with shock envy disbelief disgust.
Woman,
if ever you didn’t fully get it,
not in the tautness of your sinews,
how the appearance of a woman is believed
to belong
to the public,
that it is open invitation to
critique judgement opinion desire and rejection,
stick a personal act of transformation,
like dynamite,
within social view.
Woman,
if you want to know not
what others want you to be
but the stuff you’re made of,
Go,
Shave your head.
30 Tuesday Oct 2018
The knots in the wood strong
hands might try
to force flat and out,
erase..
impossible.
The tree has earned those twists and kinks,
hardened, toughened grooves and bubbles,
bulged eyes skilled at a different sight.
Gentle the hand given access
to the yearning, sorrowed places-
they are not to be fixed.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 