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.

What is to come?

11 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by feralpoet in approaching, becoming, community, fertile, motion, movement, poems, poetry, violence, work

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What is to come

with such violence in the world?

Old as existence, violence arises and

falls away, erupts and leaves ash heaps,

sterility, an airlessness that waits,

waits,

waits

until seeds able to withstand–and bring Life–

from extremes

begin anew.

But the cycles can not, will not, alter

until every one of us, each one unto themselves,

can reach the threshold of greeting

the violence with and in

ourselves.

Begin, begin, as those stalwart seeds,

to come consciously into relationship

with the most difficult impulses we humans possess,

one by one by one, together,

let us move into wisdom’s ability

to navigate this earthly realm

beautifully and whole.

The open door

12 Saturday Feb 2022

Posted by feralpoet in change, community, growing, home, honoring, learning, listen, Love, poems, poetry, transition, unlearning, wonder, work

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Somehow it is February and 79 degrees.

What a wonder.

We have entered a new world, mostly of our own making.

Turning back is a fantasy holding some together,

imagining it isn’t happening holding others.

Our earth mama talks with us, through us, always–

she shows more loudly by the year

the honest consequences of our actions.

Birds sing loudly on the other side of the open door,

more kinds than usually heard in chorus.

They bathe bathe bathe and chitter, twinkling songs..

A magical day,

yet strange.

Prayer flies through the open door that we all learn to listen,

listen and praise, find ourselves on our knees ready

for change that serves Life.

Languages

31 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by feralpoet in learning, light, listen, nature, poems, poetry, return, silence, wind, words, work

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I keep checking for messages.

They aren’t there, of course.

What sends messages these days

doesn’t use the language I grew up learning.

How many languages don’t we speak because of those

we had to,

pinning words down with force for

efficiency

exactness

precision

accuracy

literalness lopping off the Song of the universe?

There is light, instead, what trees eat,

reflecting on the full belly of blood-red

garden pot,

and wind talking the leaves high,

high up the towering eucalyptus.

Clapping faeries have flitting epochs to share,

and they await those willing to listen

to languages bodies understand.

More quiet than I yet can hold

is the ear that can translate for me.

God, I know what I would like to be

in service to what is far greater~

please, show the winding way…

Burial

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by feralpoet in devotion, family, ghosts, Healing, home, honoring, poems, poetry, prayer, strength, work

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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.

From sleep into waking

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by feralpoet in aging, approaching, community, devotion, digging, dreams, friends, Healing, honoring, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, weaving, welcoming, work

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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.

Allow her to move

24 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by feralpoet in abundance, devotion, grief, movement, poems, poetry, rage, welcoming, work

≈ 1 Comment

Grief stagnates

into rage.

Allow her to move;

Plant a stone,

Bury a broken song,

Sing another to a place on this earth dry

with sorrow.

Open to the endings,

without them nothing begins.

Unimaginable are the possibilities

for they

have yet to meet their own conception.

Offer the moistening river

your enormous grief.

Follow its movements,

dances are born in the currents.

Much has been taken,

now much can be given back;

Return grief to the Beauty–

tender Life may run again toward you.

Allow her to move.

Life is saying,

she needs her juice back

through the body of you.

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.