Category Archives: death

In circles

15 Wednesday Oct 2025

Posted by in Awareness, break out, connection, death, Earth, Elements, endings, eternal, fearlessness, human, laughter, learning, liberation, Life, Opening, play, poems, poetry, rebirth, receiving, release, return, ride, Sight, story, time, visit, welcoming, wonder, work, world

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Time, in circles, rolls and spirals on..

we’ve been bamboozled and blinded by firm

starts and finishes–

Yes, birth to death,

but this existence is no line.

Pluck a stitch and you’re speaking with your grandmother,

dead long thirty years back.

Pick at another and your future babies,

whether this life or another,

giggle in morning thunder.

Our brains have been trained

by unnatural and convenient beliefs

unrecognized as such.

Put on a pair of enormous shoes borrowed

from a stranger and step..one

two three..

backwards to gather a new look

at the vastness of stories dancing about.

Teach your eyes to see the impossibly invisible,

what tires and confuses you now becomes,

in truth, a consequential but very funny

game–

remember your heart

and play it well.

Full toward sunrise

21 Friday Feb 2025

Posted by in death, endings, fertile, offering, Opening, poems, poetry

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A sister dies,

and in morning

the robin atop a bare-limbed tree sings,

and sings,

bold rusty breast full toward sunrise.

Frost clings to windows,

the fuzzy round-leafed plant beside the door,

and plans.

Nothing moves.

Arranging a future, an impossibility,

a flourish at the end of a dance

not being danced.

Coffee, a book, clean water,

a quiet night,

follow the small blessings.

They are, really, thousands of rocky miles

from small,

tall as the crown of a tree attracting music

to the cold, restful,

fading dark.

Vanishings

08 Friday Mar 2024

Posted by in death, poems, poetry

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When death meets you

long before memory remembers,

wrapping tender and dark tendrils

around your heart,

a shadow casts upon all that follows.

Inexplicably.

Without reason the most beloved people,

one after another after another,

disappear.

And the pain nearly kills you.

Vanishings become a lifetime of dancing,

red shoes stuck to your tired feet,

exhaustion pulling your heart toward the edge,

right up to the moment when you find out:

The she you could not have named,

She died.

And you were with her through the end.

Ghosts haunt lifetimes.

The borderlands

11 Tuesday Apr 2023

Posted by in dark, death, fertile, laughter, light, Loss, movement, offering, poems, poetry, presence, transformation, welcoming

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I live at the borderlands,

between mountain and grassland,

river and sea.

Here, vultures gyre above the hollows, high

as the peaks

in gliding circles,

where death meets light

and darkness greets the sun.

I live the in-between,

not expected, not sane, full

in constant emptying,

I rise as others fall, gather while

the confused lose.

Accompanying all, I am ever ready

to catch the tender hand

finally opened

by life.

I can not be held,

you will never be without me.

In cracks cursed for tripping you up,

that’s my nestling place.

I can not be found where money buys me, nor

in the thing anyone else swears will conjure me–

but my laughter will.

Eventually,

you will feel within

the kindness in those peals

and the years of loss, confusion, pleading

shall mulch the most fertile ground

you could set restful, strong,

willing roots into.

Welcome the borderlands,

for in them I dwell

ungraspable.

Can’t help but

01 Thursday Sep 2022

Posted by in approaching, community, death, laughter, movement, poems, poetry

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Apples are falling from their trees

spreading sweetness to the ants and the air.

I keep wishing for a horse to feed them to as we walk along.

Skunk fans her tail at my approach

and waddles into the weeds through a living cave of stem and leaf.

Sun holds to the distant side of the mountain

but warmth and light are rising.

Laughing as I scuff along, there’s coyote–

she’s wandered into the domestic zone

to sniff things out, yes, and to stir up every dog

in the neighborhood.

Yip yip and garble bark grff.

The graveyard rests out past the hollyhocks,

walking by each day settles me.

Raw, unpainted crosses, tilted

and cracked.

Rounded mounds of earth, peaceful

and heavy.

Can’t help but smell autumn this morning.

This is your life

19 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in death, learning, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, the road, welcoming, wonder

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This is your life.

You will be abandoned again and again.

Until you stop abandoning yourself.

You will die.

Die before you die

and what emerges will hold you.

The way is long

yet it will end quickly.

What bursts through you like a flower singing

to the sun?

What cat are you curled beneath the moon?

Whatever you hold dear will be gone.

So,

how can the shimmer and spark of you

become

fully

in this moment?

If your love

20 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by in abundance, aging, break out, death, Love, loving, new, peace, poems, poetry, shame, the road, wonder

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If your love has courted you

winding and strong

to the door of Death, again, again,

ya kinda gotta wonder- – what

in

the

hell?

(An exclamation ! floowing from that question

seems most appropriate

but not in sting of a shaming judgement, No, no,

as it needs usher in a tender resignation,

an emollient of wondering in which

you slip a hand beneath that tiny bird,

approach slowly with soft eyes to ask,

how, oh how, did this loyal heart of mine learn

to love like that, to love those with inclination,

without qualm,

to do those things they’ve done?)

A new snail trail, steady and true, awaits

in this, the second half of life . . .

Towards him

19 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by in death, Hope, pain, poems, poetry, thanks

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Once there was a man

who stood tall at the head of the room

teaching numbers; he greeted us at the door

as we entered each day

and he called me Hope. But

it was longer and flowing and in

another language more musical.

He’d switched an a to an e in there,

making it a song closer to my birth name, somehow.

No one had ever called me Hope, only him. And,

truth be, it wasn’t exactly hope, but a name somewhere between

mine and more.

Between what is and what becomes, approaching without end.

Something between.

The man who taught numbers, years after I knew him,

he killed himself. The exact place where always now

enfolds him.

The man who called out Hope,

his pain outlived him.

My tears and thanks fall towards him today.

This is not

09 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by in death, devotion, honoring, Loss, nature, offering, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, undone, work

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This is not stick feathers in your hair and prance round

the earth as if you are one. You

couldn’t not be if you tried. You

can, however, think it, feel it, behave it as if

it were so. You aren’t here

to earn it. To remember it, Yes,

and to work it through.

Mass microbes work upon you–feathers

are the cartoon version (blessed though they be).

If no brook bubbles beside you, neighbors’

televisions blare craftless tales, and your mother

is dead, Remembrance,

work though it must and will take,

is what these days reaching toward your own death

are for..

Slow into morrow, into marrow..

not only could you lose everything–

you will.

With that might your cellular awakening bring glimpse

before the end

Gold of what you are made.