Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Smooching

9/26/2021

Smooching Quetzalpetlatl
Teotihuacan Mexico, September 2021

One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have
when I am lying on my deathbed is that
I did not kiss you enough.

There is a disease I know, it is called: being too serious.

Don't worry, you won't catch it from my poems.

I let eloquence have its say, and wisdom too and
mirth, for they can be needed companions as you
navigate this dimension and others.

Wherever you have dreamed of going, I have camped
there, and left firewood for when you arrive.

Try this someday: When you are packing or moving
any simple object around--imagine your Beloved's

hand--as yours. And it then might become thus, if just
for a second.

But a wondrous, true moment like that would be
enough for the integration to begin,

the meld of you and light . . . and then the smooching,
the wild smooching all the time. Why not?

- Hafiz, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

Waver in Awe, for Fall Equinox

9/19/2021

Image by Alexandra Correa

World, world, I am scared
and waver in awe before the wilderness
of raw consciousness, because it is all
dark and formlessness; and it is real
this passion that we feel for forms. But the forms
are never real. Are not really there. Are not.

- William Bronk

Funeral for a Future

9/12/2021

Painting by Colleen Koziara, www.mysticalwillow.com

I held a funeral for a future
I had always thought was coming,
and buried the world's face as yet.

The silence then
turned me so tiny
the only way forward was to dream
downward

to an early day on earth
before a single heart beat.
The atmosphere filled
with an abiding, cataclysmic knowing-

that if everything
could be born,

every
thing
could
be
born.

Love promises no less.

But a future is gone now.
All we are is this.

Our way could be
to fall toward the medicine
seeded right inside
the untamable, fertile grief
remaking things.

- Brooke McNamara

Bearing Witness

9/5/2021

Art by Andrew Ferez

Sometimes we are asked to stop and bear witness:
this, the elephants say to me in dreams
as they thunder through the passageways
of my heart, disappearing
into a blaze of stars. On the edge
of the 6th mass extinction, with species
vanishing before our eyes, we’d be a people
gone mad, if we did not grieve.

This unmet grief,
an elder tells me, is the root
of the root of the collective illness
that got us here. His people
stay current with their grief--
they see their tears as medicine--
and grief a kind of generous willingness
to simply see, to look loss in the eye,
to hold tenderly what is precious,
to let the rains of the heart fall.

In this way, they do not pass this weight on
in invisible mailbags for the next generation
to carry. In this way, the grief doesn’t build
and build like sets of waves, until,
at some point down the line--
it simply becomes an unbearable ocean.

We are so hungry when we are fleeing
our grief, when we are doing all
we can to distract ourselves
from the crushing heft of the unread
letters of our ancestors.
Hear us, they call. Hear us.

In my dreams, the elephants stampede
in herds, trumpeting, shaking the earth.
It is a kind of grand finale, a last parade
of their exquisite beauty. See us, they say.
We may not pass this way again.

What if our grief, given as a sacred offering,
is a blessing not a curse?
What if our grief, not hidden away in corners,
becomes a kind of communion where we shine?
What if our grief becomes a liberation song
that returns us to our innocence?
What if our fierce hearts
could simply bear witness?

     - Laura Weaver

Smooching

Waver in Awe, for Fall Equinox

Funeral for a Future

Bearing Witness

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Smooching

Waver in Awe, for Fall Equinox

Funeral for a Future

Bearing Witness

Archives

Categories

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