Towards him

19 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by 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.

No one ever said

09 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by in Loss, poems, poetry

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No one ever said,

Loss will remake you.

Again and again.

Loss will nearly kill you. More than once.

Ground down, burned to ash, you will have to sift through

the grit

for your own bones.

How are we to know?

The drumbeat death cry of what you hold to most dearly,

will resound out of your heart, out from your thrown open jaw,

that great river mouth of grief,

echo against lines of sinew, ripple not your blood only

but others’: Plants may bow,

may sneeze an offering of recognition and understanding.

Owl and Hawk will fight over the same food.

Your movement will tighten and slow to drink that in.

A shudder will go through the house,

making sleep a jumbled memory.

Hundreds of crows will shake the air with their passing.

No one ever said.

How are we to know?

Loss will remake you.

Thank God.

Day enters

11 Wednesday Aug 2021

Posted by in community, dark, light, poems, poetry, prayer

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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…

A welcoming

30 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by in approaching, grace, motion, poems, poetry, water

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When was the last time

someone kissed tears from your eyes?

Perhaps never.

Or, maybe, a memory comes of what used to be.

Neither matter, for there is more being asked.

A calling. A welcoming.

Have you ever wished to lower your own lips

to those salty waters?

A writing arrived today about fixing our brokenness.

I armored up at the thought.

How misguided a notion, this fixing. And

truly, how impossible.

Our treasures rest there, pulling us

gently

towards grace.

It’s all in how we approach.

Be kind.

From here

19 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by in change, poems, poetry

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A gull squawk and bristle of wind enter the room,

I’m unsure how to wake to this day.

With the candle flicker and race of hummingbirds

a bigger drumbeat of my heart joins in.

It has changed.

Heart rhythm deepens in my ears now

and tangles with the low vibration of traffic.

There’s no telling the rivers apart.

Strange.

In this turning,

listening and sensing, borders braiding,

resting a few minutes more,

I wonder,

where might we be going together from here…

All the sense in the world

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by in learning, poems, poetry, return, unlearning, water, wind

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What does waiting on the world’s approval do to us?

When we lose and lose, and the land we’ve invented

continually falls away underfoot,

a time must come,

a place emerge,

within us

when and where grasping stops.

For there is no service

to the wind, the passing butterfly, the breaking wave, or

the stone resting, thousands of years on,

inches from where we stand,

to hate ourselves in response to another’s judgment.

Think the butterfly bothers?

Or the wind?

We’ve much larger things to become

than the tarnished expectations we’ve clung to.

Move like the water,

sit with the stone,

they’re whispering a wisdom far beyond

what we’ve been told.

And it makes all the sense in the world.

The unanswerable

16 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by in approaching, movement, poems, poetry, still, transition

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How do you prepare for something

that can’t be prepared for?

How do you lighten your load knowing

what comes next requires lightness yet

her terrain, her ways,

are utterly unknown?

A voice calls down lengthy corridors,

twisting the unremitting labyrinth,

sound bouncing, all warps and echoes and dives–

who raises it may be behind, ahead..

Impossible to say.

So you must sit where you are,

without guidance or plan,

steeping in agitation, discomfort, a readiness to go,

still,

while the journey approaching may be next week

or a year from now.

Alas, where you are is what you must be.

And to what will that bring you?

Wah, there rests the unanswerable.

The road back

13 Tuesday Jul 2021

Posted by in poems, poetry, return, the road

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I, like many, come from a long line

of self-hating people.

The road back from that twists,

arduously,

and is often blind.

Today’s prayer for each of us~

May your return be beautiful.

May the old break be discovered and lovingly mended,

honored in its new foundness,

and a way of celebration, a wisdom

to walk along softly,

be born again in you.

Devotedly

12 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by in devotion, friends, grief, Loss, poems, poetry, wonder

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At 8 I lost my best friend,

with the end of the school year she skipped right up two grades,

and there without I continued on,

no one near.

At 11, overnight, my best friend decided she hated me

and the girl to whom I’d tied my heart,

living right up the sidewalk at the top of the hill,

was gone.

At 15, my best friend, girl who searched with me dark star-filled skies

and distant philosophies, disappeared

right in front of me. On a path

between two pines, she separated,

saying it was over. No reason given. And walked away.

Years passed. Each returned

for a moment.

The first in a market near a pile of avocados,

wandering through with friends on a visit home from college.

Word reached me later

she died of cancer far too soon after.

The next circled back simply to say

she’d left me because everyone in her life had left her first

and she was keeping that from happening again.

The last found me by phone, states away,

wanting to say she’d ended our friendship

because I asked too many questions

and she, being confused enough on her own,

couldn’t take it.

More recent losses diminish even those crushing endings,

hitting harder still than death–

that visitor being inevitable, embraceable and understood.

How loss does shape us,

at times the shape taking decades to decipher.

Wonder steps in,

the companion who never rejects or abandons.

Wonder walks alongside, reverently,

devotedly.

A reminder comes in the morning song of hummingbird…

turn towards wonder, always

she sings,

towards wonder.