02 Wednesday Jul 2025
Clouds form over the distant olive hills,
soft in morning light.
By afternoon, when heat has cooked the world white
and this desert sky holds back some of its blue,
those same clouds will tower and be belly grey and thick,
heavy with rain they can’t wait to loose.
Our bodies will vibrate with thunder.
26 Thursday Jun 2025
A fresh blood, now, runs from this wound,
dripping thick, womb-blood red,
to thirsty ground.
The trail follows me as I leave,
planting stones.
Each feeds dark Earth,
sticks weapons of their confusion, fast.
My back, low belly, my heart unwilling,
unaccepting soft targets,
half a lifetime on.
Planting stones returns
this deepest and cruel ancestral story
to the Mother who fashions stone into gold,
medallions for witful generations to come.
Flowers may bloom, cool waters may move,
Hummingbird brings those open prayers
to Heaven.
It ends with me.
I walk away into land of blowing dust,
with stars shining straight from the hands of God,
I walk away toward the fire
ever burning on…
21 Friday Feb 2025
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.
02 Thursday Jan 2025
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≈ Comments Off on Mettle
Withstand the Void.
Please.
Be upon your own two small feet,
at the edge,
darkness cloud-forming,
ledge a tipping perch.
Night ocean crashes on rock straight below,
the rhythmic waters moon-guided, rich and dangerous.
Call forth in echoless open and
wait,
the wind will snap and take it up.
Let the Void offer
all your fears, inadequacies, foolishness,
rage, grief, shame and sorrows.
Be with them.
Sense their intolerable
movements in your one body–
these are the monsters
you are to marry.
In union, living through and beyond
your exiled, an invitation
to what Beauty is yours deeply,
the gift to be offered back.
Leave no aspect behind–
you are here to love the denied.
Blood needs circulate.
Bones need grow. Air must enter.
Bring the outcasts and castaways under
warmth of your grand cloak.
Allow them refuge of your beating heart.
Welcome the unwanted,
a feast-filled table is set to feed everything
in dawn of this new year.
20 Monday May 2024
Twisted linen in the closet:
rumpled skirt, wrinkled vest..
Who would imagine shirts
could dent.
Comical to even consider remedying that.
Seems I can not stay put.
A magnet polarized from place
when place is done.
Not that I want to be washed from the creekbed.
I’ve bolted, leapt, flown, jumped and been
catapulted;
I’m praying for a gentler crossing
this go round.
The hanging lines held in linen
are a telling road map
of more to come.
17 Saturday Feb 2024
Posted in offering, poems, poetry, transformation
≈ Comments Off on No other way
Watching the weather come in
through breaking light,
February flowering trees moving
below with the wind,
I can’t recall the bird I heard last night.
Sleep dropped hard–thank god–and
dreams of a friendly pockmarked face
and who he was.
I’m small here beneath swirling sky,
flea to the breathing animal I try
to rest upon.
I’ve no idea what’s coming.
Somehow, with birth arrived a tossing of
security
for a life that wouldn’t crush my soul.
I know no other way.
And don’t think I want to.
18 Saturday Nov 2023
We save each other’s lives
a little
every day.
Follow a pointing finger,
find the child.
Hear a cry never
bellowed,
resolve the ache.
Listen through hands,
to a quaking,
a breaking
of a heart yet again,
and turnings of ages will echo
through bone.
These are callings
answered by few.
Let the unmoved move
with slightest
kindest
deepening
touch,
reach stars buried
and waiting
for a return to dark sky.
We save each other’s lives
a little
every day.
In this is more
than enough.
25 Friday Aug 2023
I will dance the confusion,
throw hands into smoke-laden air,
wreak the blockades of form imposed.
Dance the rage,
the rejection,
the finding when seeking’s not done.
Dance the diagnoses, the assumptions,
the warped expectations.
Dance the exploding starburst of my own heart.
What they hear
is not me.
What they see serves
their interests.
The shape of me,
the rhythms, my name–
I will dance it with fingers splayed,
feet lifting
off the ground.
I will throw down my broken song,
its weight and timing and edge.
This is my dance,
the only one I will ever get–
and no other can claim it
but me.
11 Tuesday Apr 2023
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.
28 Friday Oct 2022
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.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 