Category Archives: ghosts

Sweep the threshold

12 Friday May 2023

Posted by in freedom, generations, ghosts, grief, home, honoring, movement, poems, poetry, ride, unlearning, welcoming

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Sweep the threshold,

unlock the door,

put the busyness away–

what comes is far

too important.

Build a fire,

quiet the house,

all your sensing is required.

Hear the hoof beats?

The full horse breaths?

Mice may scratch in the walls,

spiders rattle the roof,

you’ve nothing to do

but be home.

Movements beneath your skin,

flashes of thought,

quickening heart,

allow them.

This is a welcoming.

You don’t know who approaches

only that they must.

Freedom blooms

as we set

a place for everything.

What you carry in your blood

has voice–

Let her sing.

Partnership

17 Friday Mar 2023

Posted by in change, companion, Expanse, flight, ghosts, Immortal, Infinite, poetry

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The horrible truth, felt,

finally spoken,

worse than death. Many times worse.

Sky fills with vultures, high,

dozens spiraling dozens, circles and circling.

Perhaps nothing so beautiful,

nothing before.

Large, black, some golden with angling sun,

every one of them alive with death,

their carrion feast,

every one of them, all, in flight,

wings extended and eyes bright, alive

in partnership

with Death.

Alive and flying, together, loosely

through sky,

floating and effortless,

in partnership

with Death and Wind.

Effortless.

Flying, floating, free.

And effortless.

With ceremony

05 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by in ghosts, movement, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, rebirth, transformation

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With ceremony comes the sweat

and all the questions of what to leave behind.

Set down your pain in recognition

that that heavy visitor, with tricks up its sleeve,

is simply

the pain,

looking for an identity.

If you’ve offered it one, you’ll know

because the pain has moved in and set up house,

happily snuggled behind a breast bone, or deep in the pelvis,

grateful to be held there in perpetuity.

The pain stays.

Suffering of any or every kind,

the pain translates easily from heartbreak

to backache–

ache being the tone of its song.

Pain will keep singing,

and your mouth is the one it uses

as if the voice belongs to you.

There are guests who need to be kicked out of the house,

might the pain be one of yours?

Burial

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in devotion, family, ghosts, Healing, home, honoring, poems, poetry, prayer, strength, work

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What’s it like to live the lives of the ghosts that inhabit you?

You know it well.

Ask the parts with poison in a syringe

ready to inject each time you step off their worn,

possessing and ever hungry killing path.

They seek–you know this, even without words–all light,

your light,

and they search with senses unimaginable,

like magnetism, or gravity, the tender flame

at the heart of you. And feed.

The very heart of you, the Spirit of you,

the stuff they, while living, could not tend in themselves;

the marrow of their being they nurtured with death ways.

When can the exorcism begin? How can you reclaim

your own Self,

that beauty and gift of which no one else is replica?

That’s in you,

still.

Reach for Her with every ribbon of strength

you thought you’d lost.

You are here, now, with feet on this sweet Earth,

not lost, no, only wrestling

with the ghosts your family left for you to battle.

Some warriors do not carry sword or shield,

yet they walk the battlefield alone, year after year,

collecting back the bones of those who were truly lost,

giving them, finally,

Burial.