What, then, is born?

28 Friday Oct 2022

Posted by feralpoet 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.

With ceremony

05 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by feralpoet 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?

Towards him

19 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by feralpoet 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.

Without reserve

28 Friday May 2021

Posted by feralpoet in father, honoring, learning, Loss, movement, pain, poems, poetry, stillness

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My father,

he was of the sort willing

and able

to kick me out of the family.

His threat came three times.

Not once, or, oops, twice,

but three times that cruelty was uttered, even written,

knives thrown not in spirit alone, but in substance:

To a child that is survival at stake.

And belonging.

And…so much and…

My hands tremble and my heart pounds with

the memory of it.

I grieve for her, the young one who had to stand there

and take it.

He forgot. I couldn’t.

His violence lives in me. I work with the wounds

daily.

What he was never given he could not give.

What I was never given, I intend to learn.

Some days it is a story, a living aspect

of history.

Other days I must rise up, in frightened fury,

to say no.

Absolutely not.

What family there is that is mine,

wherever they be,

their fullness of heart and vision and being

reside within and around me,

and my hands and heart can return the gifts

I have been given

in stillness and

without reserve.

Such kindness

17 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by feralpoet in learning, mystery, pain, poems, poetry, shame, the road, welcoming, wonder

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Such kindness lives in “I don’t know how.”

Past a freedom of “I don’t know”

little HOW asks in the mystery tender

after years of silently absorbing assumptions,

a force feeding of belief that you are supposed to have

already

walked the path no one had shown you and

you hadn’t yet found.

How, on this fault line shaking, cracked

and dappled light lit earth

are we to know before we know

and who–back to who before who before who–

syringed that toxin into our bloodstreams

fueling generations of debilitating pain and shame

saying we are broken

and must fight a way through

simply

to

endure?

Failing

11 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by feralpoet in becoming, discomfort, Expanse, gratitude, pain, poems, poetry, rage, undone, unlearning, welcoming, wonder, work

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What if you woke up each day pissed off.

Pissed off that you’re still here, that things are the way they are,

feeling impotent to change any of it,

that, somehow, crucial basic needs have not been accounted for

in the constellation of whoever is responsible.

What an enduring and repetitive hell.

And instead of beating yourself for–yet another–failing

you settle in

to an endless buzz of unspoken confusion

to wonder,

where could such constant pain come from?

And what, truly, is the soil to tree relationship

between rage and gratitude?

Don’t kid yourself,

those roots do tangle together

and grow in ways

so large and unarticulated you haven’t yet

begun

to trust the imagination entrusted to you

to welcome the discomfort of the discovery

Life is asking.

This is not

09 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by feralpoet 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.

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

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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.

Full circle

25 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by feralpoet in becoming, home, honoring, learning, Loss, loving, mystery, offering, pain, poems, poetry, receiving

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A full circle closed today,

from expectation to loss,

from pedestal to the fall..

A journey made time and time

again.

Bound to a nature of its own making,

the question of when the final turn

arrives being that eerie shimmer

at the horizon.

With delusion’s slap in the face

what you do with the broken fantasy

remains the treasure

at the end.

What shall be created from the rubble

and bruises?

Can you be what fed you?

Could you embody what your heart was sure

you couldn’t live without?

Emptied streets

04 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by feralpoet in adventure, community, courage, dark, global, light, offering, pain, poems, poetry, song

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A man walks beneath black umbrella,

Calla lilies bloom in the rain;

A woman stands at the kitchen window

staring out with soapy hands and sponge,

singing,

“And you look at yourself,

pacing the cage…”

The playground is taped off in yellow tape,

A child speeds home on scooter with no cars in sight,

“All the spells I could sing, it’s as if the thing is written

in the constitution of the age…”

Grass is greening, lungs ache,

and hearts are breaking,

“Sometimes the best map will not guide you…”

Stay strong and bend, be well

We are in this together together together

We are all pacing the cage–

Not alone not alone

As we walk thin line between birth and death

Now and here

Now and here

Together

Not alone

Hold that thin line dear,

Dear,

Hold it dear.