Category Archives: Body

Down the line

12 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in Autumn, beauty, Body, departing, distance, grief, honoring, motion, poems, poetry, presence, wind

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An acoustic guitar and a train track beat…

we’re chugging rugged countryside,

rounding bends,

wind streaming through open windows.

I think I’ll watch every dry yellow leaf flutter

and fall,

each flock of grass nod, swish and bow to the sun.

Sometimes grief’s a tar sticking in the lungs

and working to let it go means little

but waiting, waiting becomes the story,

waiting until it decides to let go of you.

The strum will fill your warm heart

as the clack-clack rhythm moves you through time–

be with what is,

it’s got its own magic, which you hold

and holds you,

growing in clarity, in beauty

somewhere on down the line.

Heaven & hell

29 Saturday Jun 2024

Posted by in Body, Elements, poems, poetry

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I’ve been contemplating heaven and hell,

while chewing an apple slice,

staring at where

the sweet dry hills meet sky.

I think it’s kind of like that.

They come together, an uneven between,

the elements can be explored, felt, seen,

drawn, smelled, poked:

they’re in sacred relationship.

And we have to learn, each within ourselves,

our relationship to them.

Both teach. Both burn us to essence,

if we let them.

We can enter one and take the other

right along with.

Wherever you stand, sustenance can be found.

Where’s your heaven to your hell?

Are you the same within each?

What, then, is born?

28 Friday Oct 2022

Posted by in Body, devotion, Loss, offering, pain, poems, poetry, presence, slow, unlearning, weaving, welcoming, wonder, work

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What, then, is born

of disconnection that bleaches the Soul,

fragments Spirit and sends it flying

never to land,

to land in place where it may feed and be fed,

stoke the tender embers of Beauty herself?

What have we traded to get

things?

Things.

Paper money and all the rest, what is it

but nothing,

nothing, especially

when we make it everything and carve ourselves

and one another up

for more of it?

Call back,

Call back,

Call back yourself.

Call back every shard and ripple,

each precious drop, and voluminous chunk.

None but people bringing themselves back toward wholeness

can right this ship we share.

Please, let us remember,

let us remember all

to bring ourselves

Home again.

So long ago

06 Friday May 2022

Posted by in Body, grief, naked, nature, poems, poetry, return

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What kind of oppression is this

for women to hate their own bodies into submission?

To tuck, flatten, cut, shape, build, color,

paint, starve, carve, feed, hide, cover, sculpt

and bind

such unique beauty and presence

to conform to something else?

For someone else?

Many are even convinced they do it

for themselves.

What, and whom, does it serve?

How long have we lied to,

hated, pushed away, contrived

and disappeared ourselves?

It goes beyond gender.

(Choose any system and look at how

we’ve turned it against ourselves.)

Ever noticed a peacock, tiger, or,

hell, a goat

do the same?

How ridiculous.

And cruel.

To what god have we bowed

when discarding the body we have been given,

one never to be created twice–not ever to be seen again–

to be wanted? appreciated? included?

Ohhhh let’s gather another tribe instead,

shake ourselves loose from those heavy chains

clamped on our wrists so long ago

we couldn’t possibly remember.

Woman, shave your head

08 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by in beauty, Body, break out, home, honoring, learning, Love, movement, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, strength

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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.

Soft pawed

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in adventure, Body, learning, listen, movement, poems, poetry, presence

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If the book leaves you in tears,

consider it a friend.

What can’t salt water wash away?

A central gripping has

kept me off-kilter,

winter storms filling gutters and feeding

blue mold.

In a sense,

nothing is going as planned–

precisely how this melting,

sanding, scuffing and lonesome roll

is meant to go.

As the slow unfurling tightens me into

a speedy withdrawal,

reminders trickle in to soften,

a kitten-stretch of a soft pawed

softening,

when I can.

More friends,

words heaping page upon page,

sit kindly waiting nearby

in a generous pile.

Fine beginnings

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Body, loving, nature, poems, poetry

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Fine beginnings,

like this one following a night of rain,

keep me staring out the window

even with a juicy book rife with Cassandra, uterus and Spoken

laying open in my lap.

Broken clouds, grey dashed with whipped white,

show palest blue beyond,

and hills across the bay- often obscured- are the storm-lit knees

and craggy thighs of a great woman

resting back in softened arms of earth

growing green.

Scars

10 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in becoming, Body, break out, change, death, honoring, learning, loving, nature, pain, poems, poetry, story, the road

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Scars

attest to bridges crossed battling dragons,

to threatening rivers entered

that pushed at knees, sucked at ankles.

To deep mountaintop scree, ragged, sharp and steep where

falling

meant death and dismemberment.

We were there,

we know,

we learned.

Yours lay upon your body

differently

than mine;

equally, they shape us.

Scars pulse out of step with the rest.

Each must be attended to,

honored,

for what they give,

for what they gave up.

This day

31 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by in aging, becoming, Body, community, fear, honoring, learning, Loss, nature, pain, poems, poetry, transition, work

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This day he walks slowly,

approaching in nearly a shuffle.

Handing me a candy- the kind once known as penny-

saying, this aging stuff, not so easy.

I used to think, he shares with a soft shake of his head,

I could stay a perpetual teenager. But not so.

His health, not good,

the poetry, music and culture

having always fed him

no longer enough.

Or so it seems to him, on this day.

Clutching a small handled paper bag, one somehow

always carried,

he steps away, looking emptily into distance

not physically there,

leaving me with a golden,

foil covered chocolate coin never to be eaten

and an appreciation for his difficult facing

of what he long imagined

could be outrun.

Come back

05 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in abundance, beauty, Body, home, movement, nature, poems, poetry, welcoming, wonder, work

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In search of meaning

but having to pay the bills.

Needing to matter,

but busy cursing the neglected dogs keeping you awake.

Reaching, yet thick in mud,

being with a sideways mess of months of days

and snarled in the wonderment of

what, in hell, this is all about…

Coming back, returning to echoes of your own one body,

again, again, again, again,

the home your fantasy conjured

minus the straightforwardness and glitter

of safe comfortable forever there

except it is precisely that in folly

and learning and diligent removal of concept

and heavy cultural residue.

This is home, your body, waiting,

waiting

for you to come back

to what is real, always with you, and still

strangely

not known.