Dawn met night over the water
long stretched, iridescent and calm,
between the two.
Flying above the waves, sips small and lapping,
flushed a morning smile to lips
already turned up at the sweetness of fall.
Dawn met night
29 Saturday Sep 2018
Category Archives: wonder
Where are the Grandmothers?
01 Saturday Sep 2018
Where are the Grandmothers?
With family torn, history unknown, stories never uttered,
lineage not spoken,
where are we?
We become dangling dolls, feet like bell clappers,
swaying this way and that with no ground
beneath us.
So utter.
Utter.
Utter your questions and longings to the Grandmothers,
the Grandfathers, the Sisters and Brothers who couldn’t grow up,
the sharers and protectors from the other side where
viewing carries a different, sideways, deeper,
beyond kind of knowing.
Stir the waters you can not see,
the current carrying you, and ask.
Ask.
Ask and the formations for you to hold and gaze at
reminding you of the support in the surround
can shape, at last, in the wet red clay
held by your praying hands-
Grandmothers, Come to me…
Where lies
26 Sunday Aug 2018
If a push,
somewhere a pull.
Where taken,
pray it has been given.
The Western sense of community..
in itself a paradox?
We’re part–everyone–of centuries of history
cycling, tumbling, molasses-thick onward
with nanosecond “advances.”
No mystery that you, and you, and I
can not seem to catch our breath.
Faster is not forward,
as bigger not better, nor more money success.
Where lies the soul stuff making life
Life?
Come back
05 Thursday Jul 2018
In search of meaning
but having to pay the bills.
Needing to matter,
but busy cursing the neglected dogs keeping you awake.
Reaching, yet thick in mud,
being with a sideways mess of months of days
and snarled in the wonderment of
what, in hell, this is all about…
Coming back, returning to echoes of your own one body,
again, again, again, again,
the home your fantasy conjured
minus the straightforwardness and glitter
of safe comfortable forever there
except it is precisely that in folly
and learning and diligent removal of concept
and heavy cultural residue.
This is home, your body, waiting,
waiting
for you to come back
to what is real, always with you, and still
strangely
not known.
The clay we’re given
15 Friday Jun 2018
Someone told me today,
“You have great energy.”
Someone else
turned out to be my middle school literature teacher.
Another day, perhaps, I’m terrible,
and a familiar stranger might not be
who I think at all.
Ground is uneven.
Earthquakes come, volcanoes blow.
A life is a creative act,
parceled out in retrospect,
birthed forward through chaos.
Unformed to the end
each of us shapes the clay we’re given.
The world will think
whatever it thinks,
what matters is speaking God straight back
into God’s own ear.
Symptoms
13 Wednesday Jun 2018
Aching back, pounding head,
weakening eyes, softening memory,
anger, nightmare, spasm..
Symptoms.
What loves to be complained about
over tea, through the phone,
aloud aloud somebody hear this, oh please.
Imagine turning attention around,
bear chewing his tail-
Wake to me!
Symptom becomes lotus
opening
from murky waters into light.
Manifestation of inner
to outer,
an offering
a medicine
a gift.
Pain is not for pain’s own sake.
With suffering,
we alter to listen.
Awareness reaches up,
roots down,
grows.
Writer without words
27 Sunday May 2018
Dancer
unable to dance,
Writer
without words,
Climber
minus a mountain,
What now?
Not grasping for known
while Unknown is your becoming
means finding,
and learning
a whole new way to move.
Wiggle a little,
court the formless
in this precious release
of who you believe yourself
to be.
The turning of the world
22 Tuesday May 2018
It’s the twist of a good story
to say it begins where it begins.
Because who is to say what happened first?
The lines we lead, roads we walk, families we form,
always
always something came before..
and during.
Land of birth, food of soil, light of sun,
books read, laughter lived, sex, music,
slumber.
Infinite details of the turning of the world,
and equally many perspectives,
makes knowing
a sweet impossibility.
Twenty-five years on
19 Saturday May 2018
Not until the attentive itch
do they exchange glances to mean
It’s Time.
And off we pile into the car, heading deep
into night and whatever flight waiting
with breath, rolling, in the wings.
Winding round and up and up and round
through dark and sensation
into rolled down window sweetness of valley grass and oak,
Stumbling, graceful, grit of dirt road scuffing,
spinning under 2 a.m. sky and flopping across hillsides,
the stars, sharp and grabbable,
become a spiral
spiral
spiral
as alive to be tucked in a pocket,
as hover, massive and in reach, directly overhead,
as rest in mind twenty-five years on.
The rest
06 Sunday May 2018
An initiation ritual,
in the dusk-scape of dream,
of shared finery, costume, camaraderie,
and non-blood family
emerging from here, over there,
here, here, there
unexpectedly,
for the me before me,
with a gathering of eager others,
to mark time with life.
Saying no, no but I am not she
not anymore
no–
But as beads pass over head, and colors add up,
layers of feather, bone, cloth
none mine
each display on this body
currently
a light in mind shifts-
not for me
but she
who may pass through, closing
beginning years, finally,
in step with those knowing when it is meant to happen.
Dressed, prepared, without doubts,
I walk the procession.
To celebrate.
To say goodbye.
To welcome all the rest.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 