Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Earth

7/26/2020

Painting by Kelly Hall.
Used with permission.

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;
you can never be dispossessed.

-Derek Walcott

Adrift

7/19/2020

Collage by Cindy Wood, www.cindywoodart.com.
Used with permission.

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

-Mark Nepo

This week’s blog is dedicated to Carl Stark,
a beautiful young man who tragically died last month
at the age of 17.

Woods

7/12/2020

Photo of Arlo Rowen-Herzog

I wish to grow dumber,
to slip deep into woods that grow blinder
with each step I take,
until the fingers let go of their numbers
and the hands are finally ignorant as paws.
Unable to count the petals,
I will not know who loves me,
who loves me not.
Nothing to remember,
nothing to forgive,
I will stumble into the juice of the berry,
the shag of bark,
I will be dense and happy as fur.

- Noelle Oxenhandler

Your anger is holy

7/5/2020

Collage by Rashani Rea

Your anger is holy.
Your grief is pure.
Step quietly out of your shadow
like a panther
who leaves no tracks.
Let your fierceness fertilize the void.
Fling generous curses
into musky voluptuous furrows
so that fiery petals
of inexpressible bliss
spring up for no reason
in the forest of your nerves.
Be what happens in tombs
and bridal chambers,
among lovers and mushrooms.
Let your bruises ripen into juice.
Keep rooting down
until you touch your vacuous core.
Precious the dung.
Sacred the manure flower.
This is the only way up
to the Rose.

-Alfred LaMotte

Earth

Adrift

Woods

Your anger is holy

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Earth

Adrift

Woods

Your anger is holy

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