Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

October

10/16/2022

I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.

Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.

Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.

This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.

- Don Thompson

What a Jar Can Hold

7/3/2022

Art by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

I've been seeing beetles lately.
Big and small--scary ones that only
emerge from their underground roost
to lay their eggs on my stairway;
junebugs, loitered into July,
who don't like letting go, even in death.

The little ones, metallic, remind me
of grabbing handfuls when I was ten
from the roses they loved to snuffle and chew.
Mr. Ingber would pay us a dime
for a pint jar full of their copper
and opaline green. Packed
and freighted for death, them smelled
the way that people smell when they begin to cry--
rain on hot pavement--ozone, rot.

I was old enough to know
what Mr. Ingber would do with that jar.
I should have let them go.
And now I open that jar, in me,
gasoline evaporated, beetle bodies dust,
my small repentance, late.

Maybe love is never lost.
If so, it might collect somewhere:
Mr. Ingber's love of roses,
my love for the beetles here,
all packed inside an empty jar,
waiting to be opened.

- Chuck Madansky

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

it is so full here in myself

5/29/2022

Maiden, Mother, Crone by Rima Staines

have your eyes ever fallen upon a beast like me
i have the spine of a mulberry tree
the neck of a sunflower
sometimes i am the desert
at times the rain forest
but always the wild
my belly brims over the waistband of my pants
each strand of hair frizzing out like a lifeline
it took a long time to become
such a sweet rebellion
back then i refused to water my roots
till i realized
if i am the only one
who can be the wilderness
then let me be the wilderness
the tree trunk cannot become the branch
the jungle cannot become the garden
so why should i

- Rupi Kaur

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

Today

3/27/2022

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

Sorrow Is Not My Name, for Spring Equinox

3/20/2022

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

--for Walter Aikens

- by Ross Gay

Glimpse

2/13/2022

Glimpse by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

It was as if a window suddenly blew open
and the sky outside the mind came flooding in.
My childhood shriveled to a close,
just like that, thread of smoke
that rose and touched a cloud - or the cloud’s
replica adrift on the slow river of thinking -
and disappeared inside it. In that dark water,
a new lily was opening, sky-white out of the muck.
It was only a glimpse, quick,
like a bird ruffling,
but I saw the flower’s
beautiful stark shape, an artichoke
brightened from within by the moon.
A path lay shadowy under my feet,
and I followed it.

- Chase Twichell

Arms Full

11/21/2021

Gratitude
bronze sculpture by Paige Bradley, 2019

Gratitude means showing up on life's doorstep,
love's threshold, dressed in a clown suit,
rubber-nosed, gunboat shoes flapping.
Gratitude shows up with arms full of wildflowers,
reciting McKuen or the worst of Neruda.

To talk of gratitude is to be
the fool in a cynic's world.
Gratitude is pride's nightmare,
the admission of humility before something
given without expectation or attachment.

Gratitude tears open the shirt
of self importance, scatters buttons
across the polished floors of feigned indifference,
ignores the obvious and laughs out loud.

Even more, gratitude bears her breasts, rips open
her ribs to show the naked heart, the holy heart.
What if that sacred heart is not, after all, about sacrifice?
Imagine it is about joy, barefoot and foolhardy,
something unasked for, something unearned.

What if the beat we hear, when we are finally quiet is simply this:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

- Rebecca del Rio

Heart Sutra

10/17/2021

"Luna's Care". Photo by Grandpa Scott Palmer.
Used with permission.

Beyond hope and fear
good and bad
low road or high road
curse or blessing
there is this moment
this invitation to arrive
on your knees
in your glory
awake.

The forestlight trembles
the mountains surge and quake
the meadows exhale wildflowers.
For even as you see, you are seen.
As you bless, you are blessed.
As you drink, you are drunk.
Nothing is outside of this.

Even when
we are dis-mantled
bone by bone
cell by cell
taken back
into creation's great belly
there is no where to go.

I once dreamed
we were a winged people
who had forgotten our wings
and then designed a whole world
whose sole purpose
was our re-membering.

Can you see us?
Violet feathers
silver sky
singing on the wind?

- Laura Weaver

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