Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

Hawks

3/13/2022

for Luna

It was late afternoon and we were standing
on the deck overlooking the gray swath
of the Pacific, when my friends’ daughter,
then four, turned to me and pointed at the hawks
flying in the distance. I can call them if I want,
she said, tilting back her head to let out a long,
fierce caw, which floated up over the marsh
and above the trees. At first, nothing. Then--
a slash in the distance. And in the next moment
there it was—nearly above us, wings spread wide,
the color of rust. And then, another, the two floating
in silent circles while she sounded her cries.
The primal cry of the human, raw and plain.
The call to prayer, the weeping at the wall,
the singer’s highest, most broken, note.
Whatever it is we send up into oblivion, waiting.
Haven’t I, too, called out? Haven’t I beseeched
something winged to do my bidding?
And here she was, calling, and here they came,
in answer, this hinged assembly, hovering
toward us on the wind. Ten? Twenty?
Enough to darken the heavens above
where we stood, weighted in place, pinned
by a cover of raptors. Bone swallowers,
snake eaters, sharp-sighted angels of prey,
their scaled feet clutching the empty sky.

- Danusha Lameris

Lead

1/16/2022

Photo by Duane Roy

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

- Mary Oliver

Everything I Have is Also Yours

12/26/2021

The World. Painting by Shauna Crandall

There are so many gifts still unopened from your
birthday. There are so many hand-crafted presents
that have been sent to your door by God.

The Beloved does not mind repeating, "Everything I
have is also yours."

So forgive Hafiz and the Friend if we break into a
sweet laughter when your heart complains of being
thirsty . . . when ages ago, every cell in your
body capsized forever into His infinite golden sea.

A lover's pain is like holding one's breath too long
in the middle of a vital performance, in the middle
of one of Creation's favorite songs.

Indeed, a lover's pain is this sleeping, this sleeping
when God just rolled over and gave you such a big
good-morning smooch.

There are so many gifts still unopened from your
soul's birthday. There are so many hand-crafted
presents that have been sent into your life by God.

And the Beloved does not mind at all repeating,

"Everything I have is also yours."

- Hafiz, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

Tethered

12/12/2021

Huangshan, China. Photo by Maria Hernandez Gamarra.

The other day, our grandbaby Skipper
held on to her brother Mack, uncertain
of anyone less familiar, held on

like a weasel to her prey,
her teeth sunk into his shoulder,
reminiscent of a burdock seed on a sock

or a limpet on a rock--how
desperately I hold on
to what I'm already held by--tethered

like wave to water, sand grain to
beach, breath to air, held
by arms I can never

fall out of, and still, I cling
to the cliff, as if the ground
weren't what my feet are made of.

- Chuck Madansky

Chuck Madansky has gifted the world with his new book
Some Days the Spoons Talk Back.
https://chuckmadansky.com/contact-2/
or click on the book above to order.
Beautiful cover artwork by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

Bearing Witness

9/5/2021

Art by Andrew Ferez

Sometimes we are asked to stop and bear witness:
this, the elephants say to me in dreams
as they thunder through the passageways
of my heart, disappearing
into a blaze of stars. On the edge
of the 6th mass extinction, with species
vanishing before our eyes, we’d be a people
gone mad, if we did not grieve.

This unmet grief,
an elder tells me, is the root
of the root of the collective illness
that got us here. His people
stay current with their grief--
they see their tears as medicine--
and grief a kind of generous willingness
to simply see, to look loss in the eye,
to hold tenderly what is precious,
to let the rains of the heart fall.

In this way, they do not pass this weight on
in invisible mailbags for the next generation
to carry. In this way, the grief doesn’t build
and build like sets of waves, until,
at some point down the line--
it simply becomes an unbearable ocean.

We are so hungry when we are fleeing
our grief, when we are doing all
we can to distract ourselves
from the crushing heft of the unread
letters of our ancestors.
Hear us, they call. Hear us.

In my dreams, the elephants stampede
in herds, trumpeting, shaking the earth.
It is a kind of grand finale, a last parade
of their exquisite beauty. See us, they say.
We may not pass this way again.

What if our grief, given as a sacred offering,
is a blessing not a curse?
What if our grief, not hidden away in corners,
becomes a kind of communion where we shine?
What if our grief becomes a liberation song
that returns us to our innocence?
What if our fierce hearts
could simply bear witness?

     - Laura Weaver

Here for Life

8/15/2021

Rafael Jesus Gonzalez at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 1983;
first blockade of MX Missile testing

I am here -
I wear the old-ones' jade -
it's life, they said & precious;
turquoise I've sought to hone my visions;
& coral to cultivate the heart;
mother of pearl for purity.

I have put on what power I could
to tell you there are mountains
where the stones sleep -
hawks nest there
& lichens older than the ice is cold.

The sea is vast & deep
keeping secrets
darker than the rocks are hard.

I am here to tell you
the Earth is made of things
so much themselves
they make the angels kneel.
We walk among them
& they are certain as the rain is wet
& they are fragile as the pine is tall.

We, too, belong to them;
they count upon our singing,
the footfalls of our dance,
our children's shouts, their laughter.

I am here for the unfinished song,
the uncompleted dance,
the healing,
the dreadful fakes of love.
I am here for life
& I will not go away.

- Rafael Jesus Gonzalez

Here for life
Sacramento, CA, 2015;
blockade of mandatory childhood vaccines

Here for life
Stratford Ontario, Canada, 2021;
blockade of experimental mRNA gene therapy

Here for life
Colorado, USA, 2021;
blockade of harmful mask mandates

Here for life and we will not go away
Dublin, Ireland 2018

A Color of the Sky, for Spring Equinox

3/21/2021

Photo by Kasper Rasmussen. Used with permission.

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

- Tony Hoagland

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

The Whole of Creation

2/28/2021

The Whole of Creation by Emily Grieves
www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com
Used with permission.

If I began the story in the middle
you might be able to smell the nixtamal, the earthy lime
of corn masa, and the tortillas rising on the comal, warm
hands flipping them into being. You might be able to feel
the spot where my long golden ribbon pierces the crust
of the Earth, thrust down through oceans and tectonic plates
even before they were dreamed into existence, looped
and woven into the shape that holds it all into place. You might hear
the rushing of feathers slicing air as thousands of angels fall
through the gap in space that birthed it all into view, each one
bringing a thread to the weaving of life, the matrix of this new world.
You might smell the smoke of the tlecuil, the oven in which life
is cooked into living, matter kneaded into feeling, formed
and pressed with fingers, breathed upon, gazed upon, made
to be something new, something transformed
from nothing to this. And here we live now, in the whole
of creation, remembering, forgetting,
and remembering again, nestling into the weft
of the fibers, yearning to be touched
by her hands again.

- Emily Grieves

The World Began with Yes

1/3/2021

Trinity Seay, "First Breath"

One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.
- Clarice Lispector

It was always yes, si, da, ja
the sibilant sound of assent,
the slippery tongue in the mouth
of the lover, the da dawning,
the ya yelling,
the si, si, si, sugary & sweet
between jagged teeth.

It was always yes,
come in, welcome, eat me,
merge with me, love,
let’s join to make another
little bubble of us
who will seem like us combined
but turn out to be another.

It was always lust
not to be lonely,
lust for the apple, the pomegranate,
fruit of desire,
dense on the tongue,
making another you,
another me.

Oh love, eat me, I am yours,
fill my emptiness with joy,
with yes, da, si, si, si
let us begin that way
to make a new universe,
soulful, sad, silly,
& full of seas,
seas that are salty
& full of the stuff of life,
me, you, every wriggling creature
we can & can’t name
with alphabets as of yet unknown,
with letters that twist & turn
& try to escape the page, the scroll, the rock,
life beginning again
with only a word
of affirmation--yes!
Let it begin
& Be.

-Erica Jong

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