Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Mother Raven

1/8/2023

We cannot live without the night,
gossamer veils of emptiness.
The Goddess is black,
but each pore of her body
emits a rainbow.
Motionless, she watches
beyond care, yet flows
like a river of healing.
Doesn't dark energy circle us all
like Mother Raven?
Take root in your grief.
That is where the sun is born.
Ascend through a bolder falling.
Her womb is immaculate silence.
Her void is moist with stars.
Yet she who cradles them all
has become your breath.
Haven't I told you there is wine
in the void between thoughts,
Joy and sorrow mingled in one cup?
Now taste, and who knows
if tonight you might not finally
embrace the fierce beauty
of your beaten heart?

- Alfred K. LaMotte

Dangerous Prayers

12/11/2022

Our Lady Prays Fire
painting with blood and henna by Xochitl Trout

Deliver us, O Truth, O Love, from quiet prayer
from polite and politically correct language,
from appropriate gesture and form
and whatever else we think we must put forth to invoke
or to praise You.

Let us instead pray dangerously –
wantonly, lustily, passionately.
Let us demand with every ounce of our strength,
let us storm the gates of heaven, let us shake up ourselves
and our plaster saints from the sleep of years.

Let us pray dangerously.
Let us throw ourselves from the top of the tower,
let us risk a descent to the darkest region of the abyss,
let us put our head in the lion’s mouth
and direct our feet to the entrance of the dragon’s cave.

Let us pray dangerously.
Let us not hold back a little portion,
dealing out our lives–our precious minutes and our energies–like some efficient accountant.
Let us rather pray dangerously — unsafe, profligate, wasteful!

Let us ask for nothing less than the Infinite to ravage us.
Let us ask for nothing less than annihilation in the
Fires of Love.

Let us not pray in holy half-measures nor walk
the middle path
for too long,
but pray madly, foolishly.
Let us be too ecstatic,
let us be too overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse,
let us be undone, and dismembered…and gladly.

Left to our own devices, ah what structures of deceit
we have created;
what battlements erected, what labyrinths woven,
what traps set for ourselves, and then
fallen into. Enough.

Let us pray dangerously — hot prayer, wet prayer, fierce prayer,
fiery prayer, improper prayer,
exuberant prayer, drunken and completely unrealistic prayer.

Let us say Yes, again and again and again.
and Yes some more.
Let us pray dangerously,

the most dangerous prayer is YES.

- Regina Sara Ryan

Renunciation (excerpt)

10/30/2022

Painting by Anke Gladnick

...Want only what is true.
This will lead you to the well of your deepest sorrows.
Follow that passageway, all the way down;
Become the dark emptiness of your absent core.
Be still. Don't measure the waiting.
Be still. Let the waiting become a fire.
Be still. Let the fire show you its secret heart;
a strand of clear light running through you.
Gather yourself there, and the luminous universe opens.
In the vast expanse, fathomless, infinite ocean of light,
Lose yourself, and find yourself, and become what you already are.

- Jennifer Welwood

Where It Ends

10/23/2022

The gentleness of the slant October light
cancels whatever else we might have thought.
It is a hard world, empty and cruel;
but this light, oh Jesus Christ! This light!

The maple leaves, passive in front of the house,
are laved in it, abandoned, green gone.
That nothing else should matter but this light.
Gentleness, gentleness, the light.

- William Bronk

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

Singularity

8/30/2020

The Flourishing Void, 2018, print by Macy Chadwick.
Used with permission.

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money -

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?

There was no Nature. No
them. No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if

the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up to what we were
- when we were ocean and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all - nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All everything home

- Marie Howe

Mother Raven

Dangerous Prayers

Renunciation (excerpt)

Where It Ends

Waver in Awe, for Fall Equinox

Singularity

Archives

Categories

Mother Raven

Dangerous Prayers

Renunciation (excerpt)

Where It Ends

Waver in Awe, for Fall Equinox

Singularity

Archives

Categories

Sign up below to receive my newsletter and updates on events and workshops.