27 Thursday Mar 2025
Posted in poetry
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Cracking thunder in the night,
buds breaking
in short bursts of sun.
A bat swoops low overhead
as dawn still dawns.
The springfulness of robins,
a chorus encircling,
and ground squirrels surface, chirp-barking,
sprint across open earth.
Before yesterday’s strange storm–76 degrees–
sap in bodies,
in tree, in human,
was already running hard.
Staying here, leaving here,
no clear way forms..
months in, I am swinging in a swing
straight over the high lip
of the edge.
21 Friday Mar 2025
Shake the tree of ancestors down,
down low in the roots,
shake the earth holding old stories
together.
I shake, shake–
Wake,
Wake up!
This handoff of poison chain-filling my heart,
hindering my body,
take it, claim it, you men,
you women, you hidden, you reviled,
you celebrated and lauded,
the claiming is now, is yours.
I’ve given nearly half a century to the unmaking
and now is the return.
Wake,
Wake up!
Rattle the tree yourselves and we’ll all reclaim,
liberate our souls back and back and back,
seeing the parts each have played, taking account,
learning the stock
of which we come.
Destroy the sickening story–
look around at the shattering, the cruelty,
division, violence–
the story did this.
Break it. Set it free. Kiss it, bow to it,
laugh as we all place it on the waves of great mother
Ocean, Her arms open and generous breasts
waiting.
She has waited eons for this. Give it
to Her.
The wounded ones return to primal waters,
freed, Reborn, brought home
into swirling creation,
compassion,
divine pilgrimage upon the greening surface
of this sensuous, generous Mother Earth
who gives, unendingly gives.
The story no longer burdens, we
are free.
Infinite gifts spring forth.
The turning.
12 Wednesday Mar 2025
Time is a not-knowing.
Life flow.
Infinite creative arising;
Step in
to where you can’t not be.
Awareness will return you there.
Here we are, within continent-birthing
and crumbling upheaval–
crashing edges, sudden limits, tighter twists,
unleashings,
every corner a blind turn.
So where do we go?
No place but here. This moment.
And when the lead line of anxiety
rockets out past our knowing,
we nod kindly, gather it home–
to breath, scent, pulse, wind, ground–
gently pulling back our reach,
that which takes us out past ourselves,
tipping us
away
from what is true.
Be loyal to this,
this,
this.
It is All.
06 Thursday Mar 2025
Sun vacates frost from its bed atop the roof,
deer, a chain of three, run through the trees,
one..then another..and another, limping,
in her way, behind.
Heat warms the room, click on,
click off, and trucks low
along the river rumble, rumble.
If the Spanish guitar stops sounding,
am I still here?
Can’t say it matters,
the castanets, listen to those castanets play…
21 Friday Feb 2025
A sister dies,
and in morning
the robin atop a bare-limbed tree sings,
and sings,
bold rusty breast full toward sunrise.
Frost clings to windows,
the fuzzy round-leafed plant beside the door,
and plans.
Nothing moves.
Arranging a future, an impossibility,
a flourish at the end of a dance
not being danced.
Coffee, a book, clean water,
a quiet night,
follow the small blessings.
They are, really, thousands of rocky miles
from small,
tall as the crown of a tree attracting music
to the cold, restful,
fading dark.
03 Monday Feb 2025
Lightest snow falling,
earthward stars drifting,
fireflies curious to kiss the ground,
and a new birdsong has joined dawn.
Migration keeps on,
my breath expands with the music
and I smile.
The art of waiting requires immense courage,
no panic at the unknown can fix it,
choices wrenched from an undeveloped state
only put off the inevitable.
Wait when the waiting asks.
You’ll see its velvety cloak swish
from the corner of an eye.
Wait.
Dissolution and decay create the fertile
in darkness.
Until a yes, an enoughness of a way, opens,
no right action.
Seeds know when,
now is for tending inner terrain
and now is for trust.
In the waiting, the fruit.
31 Friday Jan 2025
Rain through the night
and blackening ponderosa bodies rise
in thick, wet sky.
Their darking green, needle plumes and pompons,
shake dripping day.
Lately, a mystery cat laps within the boundaries,
hunting, romping, eating,
skittering away–just enough– at my voice,
her cream color like the stones,
her eyes wide and assessing.
Ice approaches after today’s relative warmth.
What’s already out there is here,
pattern of time a rounding, reason-breaking
all-at-once.
We are all there,
now.
What will be,
is.
27 Monday Jan 2025
Bound, and squirming, in the binds
of our own stories.
Brain picks them up, gut tightens and writhes,
unceasing but for moments:
Drop it.
None of this is true.
You are not this.
But the ego likes its house.
Even if the water’s shut off, rafters tilt,
light obscures through unwashed panes.
Repetition of story
and the prison story makes.
Comfortable? No. Familiar? Yes.
Dismantle the house, it is not you.
Brain picks up the story
and You put it back down.
Over, and over, and over, and
over.
15 Wednesday Jan 2025
There’s a coyote
who prances for prey, alone,
bushy tail and quick jaws,
out by the downed orchard ladder,
knows
each morning,
to amble by, crosswise, unhooked fence
to closed.
I don’t know where he wanders but
his visits thread the world,
animal to animal,
and my mind follows full marled fur
beyond the wire and through the long field
of thin-armed oaks.
The next meal is plenty to concentrate on
with wide openness,
allure, risk, and slow lichen growing,
a bounty of waiting.
04 Saturday Jan 2025
Clumps of feather snow drifted heavily down
hour upon hour
and the whole of the visible world softened in white.
A surprise storm cupped the riverland,
suspending life in sweet and requisite slowness.
By late afternoon,
a collective inhale–wind change
and the vanished birds flocked in,
lilting through air, hopping
branch to earth and
back again,
their celebrations begun.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 