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Come with me into the expansive gift of poetry to experience a disruption of habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. The magic of poetry happens when it is spoken, heard and felt as vibrations in your body.

In this blog I offer you heartfelt, homemade recordings of some of my favorite poems. I invite you also to spend time with their pulsing vibrations and pregnant pauses, to savor the luscious sensual syllables on your tongue, and to feel the subtle changes in your being as you play with the poems.

Listen, read and then slowly speak them out loud. The medicine of poetry will endlessly surprise and delight you as a portal into your own wild multidimensionality!

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How to Befriend Uncertainty

10/6/2024

 
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Come,
sit a while
in the seat by the window--
near the birds, who have shaken off
their dreams and opened themselves
to this never-to-be-again day.

​Today we won’t be asked
to bumble along the beaten byways.
For Uncertainty has come;
she is our unexpected houseguest.
Put on the water, set out the homemade jam.

Uncertainty will listen with us
as our bagels pop
from the toaster’s dark mouth.
As the teakettle wobbles
on her deep blue flame
and the coffee grounds weep
their pungent bittersweet sobs. 

The truth, of course, is
that although she’s Mystery’s Child
with no history and no proper name--
she has always been with us.

If you wake in the night,
you can hear her hum as she busily
prepares our day. She is the one
who wakes us each morning,
to drizzle new questions
into our imagination, new stories,
new colors and light.

The wind is her breath.
Her body is the water
we bathe in and drink.

Uncertainty, with the soul of a gypsy,
knows the unpaved roads
to gratitude by heart.
She is our barefoot dancer
come to show us a multitude
of ways to bless the ground.

But of certain things--
like tomorrow--
she knows nothing,
and because of this,
her love knows no bounds. 

Come close now…
she waits, like she always has,
to give all she has--
a love for each of us,
as silver as tomorrow.

​    - Prartho Sereno

Time to be the fine line of light

9/29/2024

 
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Time to be the fine line of light

between the blind and the sill, nothing
really.  There are so many things

that destroy.  To think solely of them
is as foolish and expedient as not

thinking of them at all.  All I want
is to be the river though I return

again and again to the clouds.
All I want is to stop beginning sentences

with All I want.  No--no really all 
I want is this morning: my daughter

and my son saying "Da!" back and forth
over breakfast, cracking each other up

while eating peanut butter toast
and raspberries, making a place for

the two of them I will, eventually,
no longer be allowed to enter.  Time to be

the fine line.  Time to practice being
the fine line.  And then maybe the darkness.

​    - Carrie Fountain

This sense that something went wrong

8/18/2024

 
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Eve and Lilith
by Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales, 2020

​This sense that something
went wrong.
The sense that we have fallen
and taken the world down with us.
The sense that all
might have turned out better
had she not made some
colossal mistake
in the beginning.
The sense that nature
disapproves, and every
flower is shouting about
the impending cataclysm
because a dark mother
tasted the fruit of
unbearable joy.
Dear friend, don't you know
that humans hesitate and
cower before uncertainty
age after age, inventing
this story again and again?
It's how we feel when we
don't know how to breathe,
when we don't know how to
pause between heartbeats,
to savor the delicate bouquet
of this moment.
Some say heaven will appear
when this tribulation is over.
I say heaven is an infinitesimal
grain of silence
at the tip of your exhalation,
just before you receive
the gift of another breath.
Meet me here.
We'll dance barefoot
in the garden where nothing
ever went wrong,
and there was only
one tree, whose roots
went deep into the loam,
whose branches bent down
with clusters of ripening
sweet stars,
and a sparkling serpent spiraled
up the spine of the Goddess.
The serpent was Wisdom.
The Goddess was Eve.
She marveled at the dust
in the palm of her hand,
blew upon it,
and created a Man.

​-  Alfred LaMotte

Jump

8/4/2024

 
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Photo by Haut Risque, Stockholm, Sweden

Because my car is twenty years old
and the gizmo that goes ding ding ding
when you leave the lights on
has been busted for at least a decade,
I’m always contending with a comatose battery, 
a
lways approaching strangers to ask for a jump
in the Trader Joe’s parking lot
or on a deserted street in the growing dark,
where a man in a python-green Porsche
affixed the red and black alligator clamps confidently
yet incorrectly, killing the thing altogether,
resulting in a 10 PM call to AAA,
an hours-long wait in a 7-Eleven,
and a midnight ride sitting in the cab
of a tow truck whose driver had just been dumped
by his wife of eleven years
and desperately needed to talk about it.

These are the adventures you may have
if you tend to leave your lights on, as I do,
at dusk when the light is tricky — the hour
between dog and wolf the French call it,
when the distracted mind is too full of shadows
to remember what the body did just moments ago.
By now I’m an old hand at setting up cables,
fitting black to minus, red to plus,
but I’ll never get over the small miracle
of how fast it all works, the spark arcing
quicker than thought
as soon as a benefactor turns their ignition switch;
my own car springing to life again
like Sleeping Beauty after just the right kiss;
the way a smile will ricochet from a stranger’s face
to my own, or one kind word retrieve
a flailing soul from the abyss.

​    - Alison Luterman

To Learn From Animal Being

7/28/2024

 
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​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

Still Point

7/21/2024

 
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photo by Kirill Mikhaylyuk
​Leaving home
for work
each day

I hear the trees
say "What’s your hurry?"
Rooted, they
don’t understand

how in my world
we have to rush
to keep in step.

I haven’t even time
to stop and tell them
how on weekends, too,
schedules wait
like nets.

It’s only on a sick day
when I have to venture out
to pick up medicine

that I understand the trees,
there in all their fullness
in a world unpatterned

full of moments,
full of spaces,
every space
a choice.

This day
has not
been turned yet
on the lathe

this day
lies open, light
and shadow. Breath
fills the body easily.
I step

into a world
waiting like
a quiet lover.

​    - Max Reif


The Word

6/30/2024

 
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Photo by Patrick @patuphotos

​Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”
and “broccoli” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning—to cheer you up

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.

    - Tony Hoagland

The Thing About Dying

6/23/2024

 
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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

 
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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

 
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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

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  • Home
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    • About Xochitl
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  • Wild Words Poetry Blog
  • Ecos de la Marea Cave Ceremonies