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Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone

~ a wild and sacred journey

Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone

Category Archives: movement

The sound

24 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by feralpoet in abundance, break out, digging, fertile, light, movement, poems, poetry, Sight

≈ Comments Off on The sound

I’ve love for things I can not see.

I’ve been destroyed by things I can.

If all in its existence might bloom

into beauty we can know,

what holds us back from knowing?

Not wondering?

Not admiring?

The blows of living a human life on this planet?

Being like a mole now, head and wide webbed paws

digging towards light,

I’m throwing off weight of earth

to find a way of nourishment, instinct

and abundance.

Who needs strong sight when every cell reverberates

with the songs of the universe?

I might place a pair of tap shoes on my feet

and make some noise

because the rhythm of having been born

quakes again inside me

and, this time, it might be building until

no one can mistake the sound.

Allow her to move

24 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by feralpoet in abundance, devotion, grief, movement, poems, poetry, rage, welcoming, work

≈ 1 Comment

Grief stagnates

into rage.

Allow her to move;

Plant a stone,

Bury a broken song,

Sing another to a place on this earth dry

with sorrow.

Open to the endings,

without them nothing begins.

Unimaginable are the possibilities

for they

have yet to meet their own conception.

Offer the moistening river

your enormous grief.

Follow its movements,

dances are born in the currents.

Much has been taken,

now much can be given back;

Return grief to the Beauty–

tender Life may run again toward you.

Allow her to move.

Life is saying,

she needs her juice back

through the body of you.

Orange light

03 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by feralpoet in change, movement, poems, poetry

≈ Comments Off on Orange light

Orange light shines

through half covered window.

Not sure any of us have footing now.

Collective free fall may be exactly

what’s needed.

Don’t hang on,

time’s come to rearrange all the pieces

on the board.

Golden key

04 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by feralpoet in beauty, break out, dark, devotion, global, listen, movement, offering, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, the road, transition, work

≈ Comments Off on Golden key

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.

Perhaps for the first time.

04 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by feralpoet in beauty, becoming, courage, fearlessness, freedom, honoring, Infinite, movement, nature, poems, poetry, story

≈ Comments Off on Perhaps for the first time.

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.

At the Crossroads

12 Sunday May 2019

Posted by feralpoet in break out, change, family, learning, light, movement, mystery, nature, poems, poetry, transition

≈ Comments Off on At the Crossroads

Tension builds

where the incomplete blow

as storm winds

toward completeness.

With worn boots and ragged clothes

after years in the woods

a brightness comes.

What had been too frozen to speak,

let alone move,

imprisoned by experiences of youth,

is warming with daily lighting of the flame.

Who had been silenced

who had been harmed

who survived by freezing in time

and not breathing to avoid giving herself away

is no more a fossil

a casualty

a repetition of a story too old to tell.

With spark, a light in thick darkness,

a new way forward.

Without knowing, or plan, or shape

to follow,

entry into another world–

full capacity–

at the Crossroads.

Bloom

09 Thursday May 2019

Posted by feralpoet in abundance, becoming, change, Creating, devotion, discomfort, movement, nature, poems, poetry

≈ Comments Off on Bloom

Wild rose

has begun her bloom once again

held safely within bower of thorn and halo

of virile and lustrous poison oak.

She reaches toward fullness,

touched by bee and blue,

balanced in sun and flickering shadow.

We, too, grow into bloom,

toward heaviness of fruit

and bounty of seed for generations to come.

All in time,

all in good time.

Woman, shave your head

08 Friday Mar 2019

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

≈ Comments Off on Woman, shave your head

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.

Broad hands

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by feralpoet in break out, friends, lovers, movement, poems, poetry, presence

≈ Comments Off on Broad hands

Launching from plush chair

to a seat below

and beside me

on the wool carpeted floor,

he comes closer.

Our talk bounces

ping-pongs

even spins some

between now and then–

the surprisingly many shared thens.

As his broad hands, accustomed to touch

in work, in nature, on board, on bow,

brush and pet, across and across again,

beneath and atop, thick warmth of blanket

upon which I sit,

I almost speak his unspeakable–

Why not bring your hands to the warmth of my flesh,

as they keep wanting,

and carry the rest of you right along with.

These inches between us

aren’t the turbulent ocean of your imagining.

Soft pawed

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

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

≈ Comments Off on Soft pawed

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.

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