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.
24 Monday Apr 2023
When touched, woman’s nipples are not to pucker inward,
When touched, woman’s soft cave is not to dry and contract,
When touched, her heart is not to hide away while
her clothes are removed.
When touched.
This earth, this fertile woman
bringing all life, creating
breathing pulsing offering–
always offering–
She is not meant
to be gashed stripped clawed mined
TAKEN
.
When touched, we women
are to be held, to be sung to, to be danced with,
our laughter our moisture rising
to swaddle and bathe the world.
Sing to us, allow us, see, listen to, wait for and
welcome us…
Let our own hands guide you.
When touched,
above all
be gentle.
20 Thursday Apr 2023
Troubled by this cultural grab for legacy
that older people writing books and making speeches and
facing death
fixate upon,
the strange ego javelin
aimed towards making a lasting mark–
with their initials starkly upon it–
I pull my head out of my own ass and look
at a simple and wondrous case in point,
the early spring burst of a small crabapple tree:
With first new leaves gathering food of the sun,
and deep pink buds tucked between pale open blooms
offering food to the bees in pollination’s blessed exchange,
not a cell in that tree requires recognition
or hungers in desperation to be remembered
once it’s gone.
She is born, feeds, is fed, shelters, shades, and grows,
creates new life, diminishes, and becomes earth.
That is thanks enough,
perfection enough,
selfness enough.
Enough.
Like songs of sparrows sputtering in wing flutter
all about the garden,
this gift and given
of spirit to form back to spirit,
in this, how can we forget
no loop of the Divine
could ever
go wrong?
05 Tuesday Apr 2022
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?
26 Wednesday Jan 2022
Posted in approaching, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, transition
≈ Comments Off on Lights are richly set
Ever dismantle a life?
Good lord, it’s a lot of work.
The giving away and selling, shuffling,
sorting, fussing and figuring.
Seems easy. Until you do it.
Then this liquid giggle burbles up
as you find you’d never intended to do
this thing that any spare,
and some not so spare,
time is suddenly dedicated to.
Now, leaning towards a future
you’ve not the faintest whiff of a clue about
as it pulls onward,
you stumble spin, slowly, staring out
in all directions,
including the one that’s got you in its tractor beam..
Zzzzzorp.
Dismantle, dismantle,
ditch this, heave that, pawn that,
huddle at this memory’s blast radius,
shake off the hold of that stubborn monkey,
you know–getting on with it,
despite the maniacal grip of safety,
security, and the other obsessions of mind:
Possessing illusions isn’t wealth, I tell ya.
So, here goes, scraping out the last from the burrow,
to leave only pounded earth.
What comes next rests just behind the heavy velvet curtain,
lights are richly set,
the theater hushes in the dark…
19 Wednesday Jan 2022
This is your life.
You will be abandoned again and again.
Until you stop abandoning yourself.
You will die.
Die before you die
and what emerges will hold you.
The way is long
yet it will end quickly.
What bursts through you like a flower singing
to the sun?
What cat are you curled beneath the moon?
Whatever you hold dear will be gone.
So,
how can the shimmer and spark of you
become
fully
in this moment?
29 Friday Oct 2021
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.
29 Friday Oct 2021
A day arrives
during night dreaming
when you come to retrieve a child, an infant
in button-up full-blue onesie,
from a house expecting you
and, upon entry, you recognize the woman
whose house it is. She rises from a room sized table,
oblong, solid, warm and wooden. An enormous shined egg.
Around its edges sit monks, scholars, drummers–
elders all. It feels better than anything you’ve felt
in ages.
She not only welcomes you, while rising,
but asks you to stay.
Come join us.
She says that. . Come. Join us.
Somewhere, slung between infancy and elderhood, you stand,
at times barely, and then holy invitation is spoken,
warmly.
Keep hollowing out the space,
hallowing the place,
where the invitation can finally cross from sleep
into waking.
11 Wednesday Aug 2021
Day enters, the birds have yet to wake.
Outside, settling in beside stone and succulent,
greetings begin.
First, to the distant trees.
My, they have much to say
and they know what it is to hold it
in silence.
To the white faces of flowers, turned up
towards a sky leaning in,
I whisper hello.
Hummingbird swoops through the half-dark.
Surprising to see her beside me on a branch
this early.
Are you here for poetry?
It seems to be so.
Owl hasn’t stepped into dreaming,
and he calls, and calls, and calls…
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 