Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Lean In

7/31/2022

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

At the Window

7/24/2022

I was at the window
when a fly near the latch
was on its back spinning--
legs furious, going nowhere.

I thought to swat it
but something in its struggle
was too much my own.

It kept spinning and began to tire.
Without moving closer, I exhaled
steadily, my breath a sudden wind
and the fly found its legs,
rubbed its face
and flew away.

I continued to stare at the latch
hoping that someday, the breath
of something incomprehensible
would right me and
enable me to fly.

- Mark Nepo

A Meeting

6/26/2022

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

- Mary Oliver

i thank You God for most this amazing, for Summer Solstice

6/19/2022

Dancing Tree Spirits by annie b.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

- e.e. cummings

You Reading This, Be Ready

5/15/2022

Photograph by Jennifer Martin

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along the shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life --

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

- William Stafford

Love Song

4/17/2022

Paintings by Jessica Watts

I hear other names for You – The Inviolable One,
God, Allah, Wakantanka, Higher Power,
The Ineffable. But why bother,
when You call to me by no name at all and I come.

Neither of us have a word for each other
save Us.
And even that is nobody’s business
but Ours.

So let’s forget such partitions as names
and discuss this April day within,
which captures birds in flight
and all their eggs and songs
in one straight deed of liberation.

The mighty have fallen around this peace.
But let’s not get into that, when every moment
is roses, and the scent You give off tastes
in my nose like Now.
Like Forever. Like Now.

All I want from You is nothing.
Peace is a dance, after all.
Peace moves. Peace laughs.
And Peace’s discussion is boughs of trees,
light, carriages, actors at their bent,
bravery in and out of action,
for after all, what, what, what
in this world is possibly not roses?

- Bruce Moody

Great As You Are

3/6/2022

Great As You Are by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

Be like a bear in the forest of yourself.
Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath.
Every hair has life
and standing, as you do, swaying
from one foot to the other
all the forest stands with you.
Each minute sound, one after another,
is distinct in your ear. Here
in the blur of mixed sensations, you can
feel the crisp outline of being, particulate.
Great as you are, huge as you are and
growling like the deepest drum,
the continual vibration that makes music
what it is,
not some light stone skipped on the surface of things,
you travel below
sounding the depths where only the dauntless go.
Be like the bear and
do not forget
how you rounded your
massive shape over the just ripened
berry which burst
in your mouth that moment
how you rolled in
the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling
with your sensate skin,
how you shut
your eyes and swam far and farther
still, starlight
shaping itself to your body,
starship rocking the grand, slow waves
under the white trees, in the
snowy night.

- Susan Griffin

Be the mystery at the crossroads

2/20/2022

Earth: I Flow by Cindy Wood, www.cindywoodart.com

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

The Scripture of Circle

1/30/2022

Female Strength by Helena Arturaleza Schotman

There is no refuge
No destination
No resolution
Only This

Blessed are the fruit of my womb
Blessed are the cycles that have no end
Blessed is the Wound
Blessed is the Hole

Blessed is the space that holds you always
Blessed is this unfinished life
Blessed is the eternal and unchanging
Blessed are we who bear the unbearable
who carry our cross from first to last breath

Blessed are we who know the relentless mercy of the
Mysterious Other
known only when we sacrifice our reaching

There is no refuge
No destination
No resolution
Only This

To you who are the Birther of Samsara
and the doorway to Nirvana
To you whose Love
is the bridge that flows between them
To you who holds the mirror of perfection
inside the crack of imperfection
whose Road leads nowhere and is everywhere

To you whose breast is the refuge of no refuge
To you whose passion dissolves all ignorance
and whose innocence reveals unstained beauty

Enveloped by your Grace
With nowhere to go
Around and around
Heart to the Ground

Here
I
am

-Maya Luna

Everything I Have is Also Yours

12/26/2021

The World. Painting by Shauna Crandall

There are so many gifts still unopened from your
birthday. There are so many hand-crafted presents
that have been sent to your door by God.

The Beloved does not mind repeating, "Everything I
have is also yours."

So forgive Hafiz and the Friend if we break into a
sweet laughter when your heart complains of being
thirsty . . . when ages ago, every cell in your
body capsized forever into His infinite golden sea.

A lover's pain is like holding one's breath too long
in the middle of a vital performance, in the middle
of one of Creation's favorite songs.

Indeed, a lover's pain is this sleeping, this sleeping
when God just rolled over and gave you such a big
good-morning smooch.

There are so many gifts still unopened from your
soul's birthday. There are so many hand-crafted
presents that have been sent into your life by God.

And the Beloved does not mind at all repeating,

"Everything I have is also yours."

- Hafiz, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

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