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Come with me into the expansive gift of poetry to experience a disruption of habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. The magic of poetry happens when it is spoken, heard and felt as vibrations in your body.

In this blog I offer you heartfelt, homemade recordings of some of my favorite poems. I invite you also to spend time with their pulsing vibrations and pregnant pauses, to savor the luscious sensual syllables on your tongue, and to feel the subtle changes in your being as you play with the poems.

Listen, read and then slowly speak them out loud. The medicine of poetry will endlessly surprise and delight you as a portal into your own wild multidimensionality!

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Lean In

7/31/2022

 
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Your Great Goodness from Works on Copper
by Sara Honeycutt

Lean in loved one
To the center of the circle
To the metronome
That beats all hearts together

Allow your breath to ease
As you watch
Each inhale
Sweet with life
Bowing to this moment
Each exhale
Loosening the grip of form

Begin the listening
From deep within
Clarity, slowly emerging
As pause makes room
For the light of wisdom
To rise from fog's damp obscurity

Recall through your bones
The collective knowing
That's been a part of us
For a million years

You are the vessel through which
The yet undisclosed is spoken
The soil upon which
Love blossoms
And life remembers herself again and again

    - Lynn Robinson

Today

3/27/2022

 
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Frozen Soap Bubbles
Photo by Angela Kelly

​If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

    - Billy Collins

Instructions on Not Giving Up

5/2/2021

 
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Photo by Rezaul Islam. Used with permission.



More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me.  When all the shock of white 
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come.  Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.  Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.

​    - Ada Limon

A Color of the Sky, for Spring Equinox

3/21/2021

 
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Photo by Kasper Rasmussen. Used with permission.


Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
​
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

​ - Tony Hoagland

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (excerpt)

11/22/2020

 
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Flinging open my heart’s gaudy maw,
Bodega Headlands, California


...thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia
and pawpaw, Ashmead’s kernel, cockscomb
and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm;
thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke
and false indigo whose petals stammered apart
by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute...
and moonglow and catkin and crookneck
and painted tongue and seedpod and johnny jump-up;
thank you what in us rackets glad
what gladrackets us;

and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart,
this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw
to the sky, oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked,
oh giddy, oh dumbstruck,
oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting
its head at me from my peach tree’s highest branch,
balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit,
its tongue working like an engine,
a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle
into my mouth like the smell of someone I’ve loved;

....and thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream
by plucking the two cables beneath my chin
like a bass fiddle’s strings
and played me until I woke singing,
no kidding, singing, smiling,
thank you, thank you,

...and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes.
I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude
over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,
the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems
slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. Every day.

    - Ross Gay

A Place Like This

11/1/2020

 
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Painting by Amelie Locke

Once it was in my dreams, a place that could home angels.
Their spirits and beauty captured in a moment, so pure and white.
A building, surrounded by draping plants and rolling slopes,
covered by small olive trees and lavender bushes.
A building stretched, touching the sky, not reaching the clouds,
yet they leaned over, rolling down the slopes
enveloping the worshipped state of mind.
Drinking its sweet milk, admiring its white columns,
watching the love angels dance,
while bathing in the sun's gaze.

In my dreams I am always taken back to a place like this,
my hopes end here; peace, love and hope fill my heart.

I am the clouds, I watch and admire, I see the angels,
I see the rolling slopes covered in fragrant flowers,
I run down the hill,
I watch the people living simple colorful lives.
Every upcoming step is a mystery,
they do not seek to satisfy their needs by traveling to achieve it somewhere else
but mold what they have, carving their lives out in the hills surrounding them.

Feeling the safety of the tall revered temple that stands on the hill,
hold them, embracing them,
filling the empty holes they once felt inside when they questioned the great meanings.
Their loved ones living close, down the street
in that slender Italian stone house they spoke their first words in.
In their arms the light of their life gurgles,
​a halved toothed mouth smiling up at their gleaming faces.
This bundle of joy,
part of a new generation of beautiful souls.

As you walk through the stony streets, towards the mountain top
the smell of cigarette and coffee dwindles,
pushed away by the vibrant notes of geranium and lavender.

These paths hold generations of memories, and memories yet to come.
Some day when I return, I'll walk these streets
​listening to the stories held by the rocks,
their emotions, the happy and melancholy,

Maybe one day it will no longer be a dream.

- Amelie Locke, January 2019

In honor of Amelie Locke
August 14, 2002 - October 1, 2020​
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From Blossoms

8/16/2020

 
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www.komar.org

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

    - Li-Young Lee

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    Xochi Trout in Bodega Bay
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  • Home
  • Services
    • The Emotion Code & The Body Code
    • Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy
    • Quantum Touch
    • Reconnective Healing
    • Death Midwifery & Home Funeral Guide
    • Animal Healing
  • Wild Words Poetry Blog
  • IGNITION: Exploring Sacred Sensuality
  • Ecos de la Marea Cave Ceremonies
  • About
    • About Xochitl
    • Spiritual Midwifery
    • Client Experiences
  • Events
    • Workshops
    • Ceremonies
  • Hours & Fees
  • Contact