The sound

24 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by in abundance, break out, digging, fertile, light, movement, poems, poetry, Sight

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I’ve love for things I can not see.

I’ve been destroyed by things I can.

If all in its existence might bloom

into beauty we can know,

what holds us back from knowing?

Not wondering?

Not admiring?

The blows of living a human life on this planet?

Being like a mole now, head and wide webbed paws

digging towards light,

I’m throwing off weight of earth

to find a way of nourishment, instinct

and abundance.

Who needs strong sight when every cell reverberates

with the songs of the universe?

I might place a pair of tap shoes on my feet

and make some noise

because the rhythm of having been born

quakes again inside me

and, this time, it might be building until

no one can mistake the sound.

All along

22 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by in abundance, fertile, giving, listen, offering, poems, poetry, receiving, welcoming

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Grieving the grandchildren never to be had,

I step back downward on the path

away from the peak wondering

what unborn children might become

among seeds of the treasured and unsung.

Tomorrow,

I’ll pick up a brush and dash color across

textured cotton and dried pulp

to interview an inner nobility I’ve yet to know,

to praise a blooming that’s still to come.

Come,

come unnamed seeds and show me your way,

we can cross the river, a bridge to stay,

at least until your voices are heard

whether in color, sound or word.

Sleep, you blessed ones,

a womb welcomes you now

whatever your form;

Sleep for now, you blessed ones,

fertile ground awaits you,

your brightness a bell, an arrival

celebrated ever and always along.

To the hills again

11 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by in friends, land, poems, poetry

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I’ve taken to the hills again,

pressing palm to oak trunks,

twisting dried flower from artemisia,

rubbing leaf of umbellularia.

Finely felt in muscle short and long,

a humming soreness blooms from steep terrain

and welcoming climbs toward sky.

How I’ve been so remiss from my friends,

the strange and strangled choices made

and sad distorted hold of events beyond control,

I do not know.

Leave it to the land to call me back,

to breathe life in

to one who still has it.

Faster breath and heartbeats

bring me round again to being human

with a rooting itch of vitality.

Perhaps that is the water

26 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by in change, poems, poetry

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The song of your voice rises,

one none but you can sing.

In dry winter when the pond hasn’t filled

memory of full banks and amorous critters rises.

I think of you and wish.

Perhaps that is the water,

the falling rain that swale of earth calls

as seasons become unseasonal

and our world changes.

Allow her to move

24 Tuesday Nov 2020

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

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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.

If then

23 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by in poems, poetry, presence, welcoming, wonder

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And if God moving in us is

n o t h i n g

like we expect?

Not sublime or transcendent or ethereal,

but exactly the unrelenting pains and grief,

the dark slogging through what we hope

to shed, be done with and grow beyond?

If that confusion is the way

and all that separates us from God

is our rejection–

If then . . .

what?

Walk along beside

18 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by in abundance, companion, Creating, poems, poetry, receiving, thanks, welcoming, words

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Ever

read a book

and find yourself

stroking the page while tears drop,

uttering, “God, I love you,”

and wanting to wrap that author up in your arms

to say,

Thanks?

Today is like that.

Not sure how it is to relate with actual humans

but books,

books do walk along beside

between the breathing, the hefting, the washing

and all

the

rest.

Such kindness

17 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by in learning, mystery, pain, poems, poetry, shame, the road, welcoming, wonder

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Such kindness lives in “I don’t know how.”

Past a freedom of “I don’t know”

little HOW asks in the mystery tender

after years of silently absorbing assumptions,

a force feeding of belief that you are supposed to have

already

walked the path no one had shown you and

you hadn’t yet found.

How, on this fault line shaking, cracked

and dappled light lit earth

are we to know before we know

and who–back to who before who before who–

syringed that toxin into our bloodstreams

fueling generations of debilitating pain and shame

saying we are broken

and must fight a way through

simply

to

endure?

Failing

11 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by 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.