Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Astonishment, for Equinox

9/22/2024

There is a silence in the beginning.
The life within us grows quiet.
There is little fear. No matter
how all this comes out, from now on
it cannot not exist ever again.
*
The present pushes back the life of regret.
It draws forward the life of desire. Soon memory
will have started sticking itself all over us.
We were fashioned from clay in a hurry,
poor throwing may mean it didn’t matter
to the makers if their pots cracked.
*
On the mountain tonight the full moon
faces the full sun. Now could be the moment
when we fall apart or we become whole.
Our time seems to be up—I think I even hear it stopping.
Then why have we kept up the singing for so long?
Because that’s the sort of determined creature we are.
Before us, our first task is to astonish,
and then, harder by far, to be astonished.

We come to be astonished. To be reminded that the world—this life—is still full
of astonishing things: unexplainable acts of goodness, stunning beauty,
impossible hope.

We come because we need—every one of us—to fall to our knees from time to
time, in wonder. In awe.

- Galway Kinnell

To Learn From Animal Being

7/28/2024

Nearer to the earth’s heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.

We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens:
Their seamless presence
Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking out from
The here and now.

May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.

May we enter
Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.
Let the clear silence
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.

- John O'Donohue

Joy Chose You

7/7/2024

Joy does not arrive with a fanfare
on a red carpet strewn
with the flowers of a perfect life

joy sneaks in
as you pour a cup of coffee
watching the sun
hit your favorite tree, just right

and you usher joy away
because you are not ready for her
your house is not as it should be
for such a distinguished guest

but joy, you see, cares nothing for your messy home
or your bank balance, or your waistline

joy is supposed to slither through
the cracks of your imperfect life

that’s how joy works

you cannot truly invite her
you can only be ready when she appears
and hug her with meaning

because in this very moment
joy chose you

- Donna Ashworth

The Thing About Dying

6/23/2024

The thing about dying is
I won’t get over it.
I can’t say, well
that sure taught me a lesson–
let’s go home and have a drink.
Impossible to believe
in my own ending.
I’ll continue on somewhere, find myself
in the barren halls of Bardo
waiting for a spare embryo,
eager to curl up inside some woman’s belly,
ready for the next round of traumas.
My turn for famine. Or torture.
Payback for those things I did to my sister.
I really don’t think I’ll come back as a snail
or a flea, I’m almost sure
I’ve got that sort of thing behind me.
But suppose it really is absolute
darkness descending and nothing
to follow. Not even silence.
(Silence needs someone to notice it.)
Never to see the high-flying blue
and white sky again.
Or the sea.
The sea.
That powerful wide-winged old woman.
Every time I look, she’s there where I left her.
When I die, I doubt
she will stay on very long without me.
The waves rolling in
without my praise to assist them.
No, if there’s nothing
after I die, if it really is the end,
I’ll have to take the sea with me when I leave.
Forgive me.

- Mildred Tremblay

Rift Valley

6/2/2024

The Great Rift Valley, Kenya

Between one world and another,
Lies the rift and the increasing separation,
As the plates of one mind slip away
From the plates of another mind.
I do not question which way I am to go,
But call to my heart to act on the decision made
To follow the soul
Or I will be split apart too,
As so many are,
Between violence
And Beauty.
The violent demands of our everyday life
And the strange beauty of Spirit afar.
I must choose Beauty
No matter the cost in this life.
I must choose and leap
Across the widening valley;
We cannot rest between.
Leap!
Ah Beauty! Receive me in your open arms.

- Deena Metzger

Sweep the Threshold

3/31/2024

Riverbed Comforter
Painting by Duy Huynh

Sweep the threshold,
unlock the door,
put the busyness away--
what comes is far
too important.
Build a fire,
quiet the house,
all your sensing is required.
Hear the hoof beats?
The full horse breaths?
Mice may scratch in the walls,
spiders rattle the roof,
you've nothing to do
but be home.
Movements beneath your skin,
flashes of thought,
quickening heart,
allow them.
This is a welcoming.
You don't know who approaches
only that they must.
Freedom blooms
as we set
a place for everything.
What you carry in your blood
has voice--
Let her sing.

- Willow Annan Rose

Color

2/4/2024

Up ahead it’s white. Snow animal,
I’m running at your back. I’ve failed to tell you
I’ve been hungry all this time, to tell you
I’ve been searching for you, like meat,
like water. All my life, I’ve distanced
myself. As if to know you was to drown.
As if to find you I’d usher myself further
from what is real. I’ve been adrift along
the threads of time leading me out
beyond an imagined frame. I’ve untied myself,
uncuffed the arms and neck. I didn’t know
I was hurt like that. I didn’t know
there was a force pulling me downward
toward a bedrock, lulling me to sleep.
You are the one escaping, you are the one
breaking free. I understand your astonishing
dash to freedom, done with the estranged wind,
done with frost and storm, orchids curling
outward beyond grief. The road widens
to glory. The road disappears.

- Tina Chang

Day Dream

1/21/2024

One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift
as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet
as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder
or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason,
Even in winter, even in the rain.

- A.S. J. Tessimond

The Patience of Ordinary Things

12/10/2023

"la reflexion como consulta y seguridad"
reflection as consult and assurance
Art by Troy Farrell, [email protected]

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

- Pat Schneider

Break

10/15/2023

Rest, now.
Let the weight you run from every day
now draw you down.

Later there will be time to tend
to everything left undone.
Now, rest.

Fall
into your own bones
lying horizontal on this ground.

Come
into your dark corners.
Come into this

original nakedness
under all the layers.
Come where all your losses

split
you
open.

Don't rise,
yet--
Rest.

Be drawn deeper down
into the salt tide of tears.
Let grief wash you,

then drown you
beyond the name
you first were given,

when you reached to touch
your own mother's face for the very first time,
and she smiled her light down into you.

Now reach those same fingers
for the face of infinity--
so that, opening your eyes

you will know
the one dreaming you
is pleased with you,

that everything seen
is your self,
and that now is the time

to rise wholehearted into the work
aching to be animated
by precisely you.

- Brooke McNamara

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