Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Funeral for a Future

9/12/2021

Painting by Colleen Koziara, www.mysticalwillow.com

I held a funeral for a future
I had always thought was coming,
and buried the world's face as yet.

The silence then
turned me so tiny
the only way forward was to dream
downward

to an early day on earth
before a single heart beat.
The atmosphere filled
with an abiding, cataclysmic knowing-

that if everything
could be born,

every
thing
could
be
born.

Love promises no less.

But a future is gone now.
All we are is this.

Our way could be
to fall toward the medicine
seeded right inside
the untamable, fertile grief
remaking things.

- Brooke McNamara

Teotihuacan, September 2021
Wisdom from the ancient being Quetzalpetlatl,
one who has seen the death and rebirth
of many civilizations.

What is Left to Say

8/29/2021

Painting by Amelie Locke, 2018.

The self steps out of the circle;
it stops wanting to be
the farmer, the wife, and the child.

It stops trying to please
by learning everyone's dialect;
it finds it can live, after all,
in a world of strangers.

It sends itself fewer flowers;
it stops preserving its tears in amber.

How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequents the junkyards
knowing all words are secondhand.

It has not chosen its poverty,
this new frugality.
It did not want to fall out of love
with itself. Young,
it celebrated itself
and richly sang itself,
seeing only itself
in the mirror of the world.

It cannot return. It assumes
its place in the universe of stars
that do not see it. Even the dead
no longer need it to be at peace.
Its function is to applaud.

- Lisel Mueller

A Tendency to Shine, for Summer Solstice

6/20/2021

Coatlaxopeuh: She who comes flying
from the region of light like an eagle on fire
a.k.a. Lady G
a.k.a. You!

If you prefer smoke over fire
then get up now and leave.
For I do not intend to perfume
your mind's clothing
with more sooty knowledge.
No, I have something else in mind.

Today I hold a flame in my left hand
and a sword in my right.
There will be no damage control today.

For God is in a mood
to plunder your riches and
fling you nakedly
into such breathtaking poverty
that all that will be left of you
will be a tendency to shine.

So don't just sit around this flame
choking on your mind.
For this is no campfire song
to mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with.

Jump now into the space
between thoughts
and exit this dream
before I burn the damn place down.

-Adyashanti

Now is the Time

6/13/2021

Telling Stories to the Trees by Rima Staines

Now is the time to know
that all you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
a lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
that all your ideas of right and wrong
were just a child's training wheels
to be laid aside
when you finally live
with veracity
and love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
whom the Beloved
has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
why do you still
throw sticks at your heart
and God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
that incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
that every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time for you to compute the impossibility
that there is anything
but Grace.

Now is the season to know
that everything you do
is sacred.

-Hafiz, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

somewhere i have never traveled

5/16/2021

Painting by Maria de LosAngeles

somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

- e e cummings

Senseless Perfection

5/9/2021

Chalk by Kirsten DeBoer. Used with permission.

Things don't happen for a reason
Sweet child
No
Life doesn't need a reason
For happening
It simply blooms forth
With breathtaking chaos
Rains down on you
With senseless beauty
And immeasurable heartache
You can make up stories
If you like
About why things happen
The way that they happened
You can close one eye and squint
To make up patterns
You can tell stories of
Tragedy
Or perfection
Curses
Or blessings
Or you can simply stand naked in
The rain
You can realize nothing
Will ever really make sense
Not if you're really honest
Not if you're truly listening
Nothing happens for a reason
Yes, this is the truth
This is it
There is nothing else
But your own heart
Plunging
Into reality
Your own heart
Drinking down
The eruption of stars
That is this radical emergence
Of soul in body
Of breath meeting sky
Maybe
There is nothing else to look for
Maybe it didn't work out for the best
Maybe it isn't an unfortunate mess
Maybe no great spirit is helping
Anything go your way
Maybe
Just maybe
Life unfolds
Relentlessly
With no holy plan
Maybe
It is sacred
Just as it is
Its power and innocence
Require no justification
Its perfection requires no meaning
Maybe nothing
Means anything
Other than what the Rose
Means
When it blooms
It means
Here I am
Here I am
Here I am
Here I am

- Maya Luna

The Completion of Our Birth

4/18/2021

Through the Waters by Sara Honeycutt
www.newgallerystudio.com

Millennium Blessing

There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.

- Stephen Levine

The Turtle

8/9/2020

Photo: Endangered Olive Ridley Turtle
www.hindustantimes.com.

The turtle
breaks from the blue-black
skin of the water, dragging her shell
with its mossy scutes
across the shallows and through the rushes
and over the mudflats, to the uprise,
to the yellow sand,
to dig with her ungainly feet
a nest, and hunker there spewing
her white eggs down
into the darkness, and you think

of her patience, her fortitude,
her determination to complete
what she was born to do----
and then you realize a greater thing----
she doesn’t consider
what she was born to do.
She’s only filled
with an old blind wish.
It isn’t even hers but came to her
in the rain or the soft wind
which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.

She can’t see
herself apart from the rest of the world
or the world from what she must do
every spring.
Crawling up the high hill,
luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin,
she doesn’t dream
she knows

she is a part of the pond she lives in,
the tall trees are her children,
the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.

-Mary Oliver