Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Change the Lighting

1/2/2022

Drawing by Bodhi Hope. Used with permission.

If you can't change yourself, after all
the efforts, change the light
by which you read your story.
Exchange overhead for something softer -
a lamp, a candle, a vine of shining
holiday lights - and feel yourself
become hugged by the fabric of shadows.
You see the darkness here has wisdom too.
You see these objects around become related
by the pregnant emptiness that holds them,
and you. Let this light reveal the rapture
of being just this. Then, further still, try
moonlight, or no light, until, at last,
this open, sourceless incandescence
which you are
no matter who you think you are
will follow you from the inside
wherever you may go, however
you may change, or not.

- Brooke McNamara

Aunt Leaf

7/11/2021

Shapeshifter Night by Shauna Crandall.

Needing one, I invented her – – –
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I’d call into the leaves,
and she’d rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we’d travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker – – –
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish – – – and all day we’d travel.

At day’s end she’d leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she’d slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she’d hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

– Mary Oliver

You didn't come here to get mangled

3/7/2021

Painting by Rashani Rea

You didn't come here to get mangled
by the gleaming machinery of the Mind.
You didn't come here to get welded and forged into a
Republican, Democrat, Sunni or Shi'a,
to get angry at your jagged shadow in broken glass,
or see your own reflection as approaching disaster.
You came to be astonished by a dust mote.
You came to find the Maker of all things
embodied in a dandelion.
You are here to be torn by laughter and pain,
then healed by the tang of a berry
on your wild tongue.
There are no right angles, no straight lines
in the serpent body of the earth.
Valleys, rivers, and hills are the only borders.
Dark-eyed Mother Raven looks down
and sees them as restless waves in the ocean
of Holy Matter.
What makes this planet sacred
is the unfinished circle, not the wall.
What guides us is the wayless curve
in a labyrinth of fallen alder leaves after the storm,
a cloud that stains the soft rice paper sky,
brushstroke of geese in flight.
Why waste another moment arguing
for or against
when you could slip back down a beam
of breath, soft as moonlight,
into the silent radiance you Are?

- Alfred K. LaMotte

Quietness

2/14/2021

Drawing by Erika Grimm Vance

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like somebody suddenly born
into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

- Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Eagle Poem

1/31/2021

Photograph by Kreated Media. Used with permission.

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

-Joy Harjo

The Beautiful Animal

1/17/2021

Painting by Jordan Henderson

By the time I recalled that it is also
terrifying, we had gone too far into
the charmed woods to return. It was then

this beautiful animal appeared in our path:
ribs jutting, moon-fed eyes moving
from me to you and back. If we show

none of the fear, it may tire of waiting
for the triggering flight, it may ask only
to lie between us and sleep, fur warm

on our skin, breath sweet on our necks
as it dreams of slaughter, as we dream
alternately of feeding and taming it

and of being the first to run. The woods
close tight around us, lying nested here
like spoons in a drawer of knives, to see

who wakes first, and from which dream.

- Geoffrey Brock

Nativity

12/27/2020

What if...
inside of you right now there was
the precious treasured long-awaited radiant beloved You,
just waiting to be born...

Photo by Robert Rowen-Herzog, 2007.

No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.
Even the moon leaves her when she opens
Deeper into the ripple in her womb
That encircles dark, to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her,
A face deciphers itself from water,
And she curves around the gathering wave,
Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,
She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.
A red wire of pain feeds through every vein,
Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first,
Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.

- John O-Donohue

For the Sleepwalkers

11/15/2020

Collage by Cindy Wood, www.cindywoodart.com.
Used with permission.

Tonight I want to say something wonderful
for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith
in their legs, so much faith in the invisible

arrow carved into the carpet, the worn path
that leads to the stairs instead of the window,
the gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror.

I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing
to step out of their bodies into the night,
to raise their arms and welcome the darkness,

palming the blank spaces, touching everything.
Always they return home safely, like blind men
who know it is morning by feeling shadows.

And always they wake up as themselves again.
That's why I want to say something astonishing
like: our hearts are leaving our bodies.

Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs
flying through the trees at night, soaking up
the darkest beams of moonlight, the music

of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches.
And now our hearts are thick black fists
flying back to the glove of our chests.

We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.
We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-
walkers who rise out of their calm beds

and walk through the skin of another life.
We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness
and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.

- Edward Hirsch

Terra Incognita

10/18/2020

Painting by Kirsten DeBoer.
Used with permission.

There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of
vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,
we know nothing of, within us.
Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices
there is a marvelous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty
and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life
and me, and you, and other men and women
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft
softer than the space between the stars,
and all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
alternately palpitant,
when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
of Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,
we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort
and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop
of purple after so much putting forth
and slow mounting marvel of a little tree.

- D.H. Lawrence

Earth

7/26/2020

Painting by Kelly Hall.
Used with permission.

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;
you can never be dispossessed.

-Derek Walcott