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Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone

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Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone

Category Archives: poems

Spring

05 Monday May 2025

Posted by feralpoet in abundance, community, companion, connection, creation, Earth, Elements, Opening, poems, poetry, seasons, spring, transformation

≈ Comments Off on Spring

Bees have buried themselves

in crab apple’s blooms,

hummingbird launches skyward,

chattily, all the frills of mating on display.

Stripey-legged bobcat’s ghostly moves

stitch the garden knoll

while anise hyssop digs into her new home

and calendula flowers at hollyhock’s feet.

Everybody’s humming their song…

Close at hand

26 Saturday Apr 2025

Posted by feralpoet in devotion, human, Life, movement, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, the road, travel, walking, welcoming, wonder, work

≈ Comments Off on Close at hand

The Mountain meets the clouds,

the Mountain stands on the other side

of the world.

Moving your feet, left

then right,

muscles flex, breath rushes in

then out..

you are fire,

heart pumping,

you are water,

blood rivering through,

you are air,

lungs bellowing,

you are earth,

bones holding, levering, building.

Shoes crease, then crack,

soon tear,

body aches,

mind strains.

You can journey to the Mountain

on two feet, on all fours, on belly

with hands clawing along.

You can also sit–

the depths required, the same–

whatever territory that needs be traversed

travels with you,

rests with you,

sleeps within you,

requires the all of you.

Awake.

The Mountain is close at hand.

What never wasn’t there

04 Friday Apr 2025

Posted by feralpoet in Awareness, devotion, liberation, mystery, poems, poetry, presence, wonder

≈ Comments Off on What never wasn’t there

How tangled we are

in the journey back to God,

the ever-winding, no two ways the same,

trial and error, washing the mirrors

of our own perceptions, struggles and joys of it.

But your way and my way, they quiver the web,

shimmer the web of which all

is part.

My awakening is your awakening

and back again,

waves of the One ocean

mothering every being, each singular thing,

into itself

again.

Nature recognizing its true nature,

life falling into love

with Life.

Here we are,

discovering what never

wasn’t there.

How funny.

Until

02 Wednesday Apr 2025

Posted by feralpoet in Awareness, creation, eternal, mystery, poems, poetry, undone, waking, welcoming, wonder, work

≈ Comments Off on Until

I begin now,

and now,

now.

I am born here,

in this,

as this,

through that.

How many times can a person be born

in a single lifetime?

Infinite births.

Unending new; we are

Creation

always attending

to the delicious upwelling

of awareness.

Ditching the stories, clearing debris

of mind

by arriving

in this eternal moment.

Just words–

meaningless–

. . . until Lived.

Shake the tree

21 Friday Mar 2025

Posted by feralpoet in Earth, poems, poetry

≈ Comments Off on Shake the tree

Shake the tree of ancestors down,

down low in the roots,

shake the earth holding old stories

together.

I shake, shake–

Wake,

Wake up!

This handoff of poison chain-filling my heart,

hindering my body,

take it, claim it, you men,

you women, you hidden, you reviled,

you celebrated and lauded,

the claiming is now, is yours.

I’ve given nearly half a century to the unmaking

and now is the return.

Wake,

Wake up!

Rattle the tree yourselves and we’ll all reclaim,

liberate our souls back and back and back,

seeing the parts each have played, taking account,

learning the stock

of which we come.

Destroy the sickening story–

look around at the shattering, the cruelty,

division, violence–

the story did this.

Break it. Set it free. Kiss it, bow to it,

laugh as we all place it on the waves of great mother

Ocean, Her arms open and generous breasts

waiting.

She has waited eons for this. Give it

to Her.

The wounded ones return to primal waters,

freed, Reborn, brought home

into swirling creation,

compassion,

divine pilgrimage upon the greening surface

of this sensuous, generous Mother Earth

who gives, unendingly gives.

The story no longer burdens, we

are free.

Infinite gifts spring forth.

The turning.

This.

12 Wednesday Mar 2025

Posted by feralpoet in devotion, honoring, Infinite, laughter, learning, leaving, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, welcoming, wonder

≈ Comments Off on This.

Time is a not-knowing.

Life flow.

Infinite creative arising;

Step in

to where you can’t not be.

Awareness will return you there.

Here we are, within continent-birthing

and crumbling upheaval–

crashing edges, sudden limits, tighter twists,

unleashings,

every corner a blind turn.

So where do we go?

No place but here. This moment.

And when the lead line of anxiety

rockets out past our knowing,

we nod kindly, gather it home–

to breath, scent, pulse, wind, ground–

gently pulling back our reach,

that which takes us out past ourselves,

tipping us

away

from what is true.

Be loyal to this,

this,

this.

It is All.

Can’t say

06 Thursday Mar 2025

Posted by feralpoet in beauty, play, poems, poetry, sound

≈ Comments Off on Can’t say

Sun vacates frost from its bed atop the roof,

deer, a chain of three, run through the trees,

one..then another..and another, limping,

in her way, behind.

Heat warms the room, click on,

click off, and trucks low

along the river rumble, rumble.

If the Spanish guitar stops sounding,

am I still here?

Can’t say it matters,

the castanets, listen to those castanets play…

Full toward sunrise

21 Friday Feb 2025

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

≈ Comments Off on Full toward sunrise

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.

In the waiting

03 Monday Feb 2025

Posted by feralpoet in creation, dark, endings, fertile, Opening, poems, poetry

≈ Comments Off on In the waiting

Lightest snow falling,

earthward stars drifting,

fireflies curious to kiss the ground,

and a new birdsong has joined dawn.

Migration keeps on,

my breath expands with the music

and I smile.

The art of waiting requires immense courage,

no panic at the unknown can fix it,

choices wrenched from an undeveloped state

only put off the inevitable.

Wait when the waiting asks.

You’ll see its velvety cloak swish

from the corner of an eye.

Wait.

Dissolution and decay create the fertile

in darkness.

Until a yes, an enoughness of a way, opens,

no right action.

Seeds know when,

now is for tending inner terrain

and now is for trust.

In the waiting, the fruit.

Rain through the night

31 Friday Jan 2025

Posted by feralpoet in poems, poetry, time

≈ Comments Off on Rain through the night

Rain through the night

and blackening ponderosa bodies rise

in thick, wet sky.

Their darking green, needle plumes and pompons,

shake dripping day.

Lately, a mystery cat laps within the boundaries,

hunting, romping, eating,

skittering away–just enough– at my voice,

her cream color like the stones,

her eyes wide and assessing.

Ice approaches after today’s relative warmth.

What’s already out there is here,

pattern of time a rounding, reason-breaking

all-at-once.

We are all there,

now.

What will be,

is.

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