Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Life's Longing for Itself

7/25/2021

In honor of Silas, my first-born child,
who leaves home this week
to heed Life's calling...

Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He also loves the bow that is stable.

- Kahlil Gibran

Of Being

7/18/2021

Photo by my awesomely ineluctable cousin,
Scott Palmer.
Used with permission.

I know this happiness
is provisional:

the looming presences-
great suffering, great fear-

withdraw only
into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery:

- Denise Levertov

Aunt Leaf

7/11/2021

Shapeshifter Night by Shauna Crandall.

Needing one, I invented her – – –
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I’d call into the leaves,
and she’d rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we’d travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker – – –
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish – – – and all day we’d travel.

At day’s end she’d leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she’d slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she’d hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

– Mary Oliver

Food and Water

7/4/2021

The Dreamer by Shanti Bennett

Sit yourself kindly down
and begin to breathe

with and as
the ache of being,
instead of above it.

Remember your first questions.

Enduring and unanswerable,
they can make you
curiosity again.

Gently,

allow your heart to hand you
every last piece
of who you truly are.

This is the food you’ve been hungry for.

This is the water that will quench.

Softly you dissolve
into an undomesticated friendship
with your world.

Enter into it again
with that quiet quivering
in your now more-human heart,

and let an uncaused joy
come out of your eyes --
so the others feel it,

so it’s all of ours
to eat and drink and share.

-Brooke McNamara

Life's Longing for Itself

Of Being

Aunt Leaf

Food and Water

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Life's Longing for Itself

Of Being

Aunt Leaf

Food and Water

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