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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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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

I No Longer Pray

2/25/2024

 
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​I no longer pray— 
now I drink dark chocolate 
and let the moon sing to me.

I no longer pray--
I let my ancestors dance 
through my hips
at the slightest provocation.

I no longer pray--
I go to the river
and howl my ancient pain 
into the current.

I no longer pray--
I ache, I desire,
I say “yes” to my longing.

I no longer pray as I was taught
but as the stars crawl
onto my lap like soft animals at nighttime 
and God tucks my hair behind my ears 
with the gentle fingers of her wind
and a new intimacy is uncovered in everything,
perhaps it's that I’m finally learning 
how to pray.

    - Chelan Harkin

Quiet Place

2/18/2024

 
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Are you looking for a quiet place?
But friend, you are already here.
The repose of your blood between pulsations.
A secret chamber in your chest where
you have no enemies,
no one is to blame,
and the endless journey
has never begun.
Here even prayers for peace need no speaking.
You can disperse into
the finer element you are before you breathe.
You can be the sparkling sky
in the lungs of a hummingbird,
smoke of sage in desert air, aureole in emptiness
where the flame just blew out.

Here you can burn away
because you remember your body
is made of vanished stars.
You can stumble and fall
into your own rhythm, which feels
like you are not moving at all
because your mind is at rest in flesh
that needs no discipline of stillness.
You are a nest inside the egg,
a mother's womb that carries
her own savior, the seed
of what you have always been seeking.

Now flower
on a Winter night.

- Alfred K. LaMotte

Keep Me Fully Glad

9/24/2023

 
Picture
Photo by Rodolpho Sanches Carvolho

Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand.
In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing.
I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast.
Make my life glad with nothing.
The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy.

​    - Rabindranath Tagore


Praises of this Place

6/4/2023

 
Picture
Aurora Light During the Night
Photo by Mike Lewinski

If not now
when? Who will sing
the praises of this place
if not you?
Can you make love
with limp excuses?
Just one word
in your own voice
would cock the heads of robins,
but today they listen only to worms.
Every morning
a thousand birds
give the world a chorus of themselves
without hesitation or regret.
All through the day
the trees and sky
speak in the hushed voices of lovers,
and in the night
the grasses sigh in the warm hands
of the evening breeze
while fireflies flash their honest love
to the distant stars passing overhead.
When you are ready, 
join the conversation--
It still needs the strong and delicate
sound of your voice.

    - Thomas Griffin

The Stolen Child

4/16/2023

 
Picture
The Coming Mythos by Michael Zieve
www.artworkarchive.com/profile/michael-zieve
​
​Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
    From the hills above Glen-Car,
    In pools among the rushes
    That scarce could bathe a star,
    We seek for slumbering trout
    And whispering in their ears
    Give them unquiet dreams;
    Leaning softly out
    From ferns that drop their tears
    Over the young streams.
    Come away, O human child!
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,

    For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.


Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

   
- William Butler Yeats

Voyage

1/29/2023

 
Picture

​I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.

—And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."

Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage--

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,

I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,
             and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
                                                        by pushing into it--

The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

    - Tony Hoagland

The Goddess of Reality (excerpt)

1/15/2023

 
Picture
Lelihanah: She who Licks up and Devours the World
the eternal Goddess, eternally shines in fullness, containing all things
Painting by Michael Zieve
https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/michael-zieve

Let it be known—I worship the Goddess of Reality

The one with tangled hair where insects nest, 
the one with blood soaked thighs,
The one who crushes my concepts with her razor teeth
and spits my mind into the wind

​She shakes her belly to the beat of primordial passion 
and feasts on the meat of ignorance 

She wanders in the garden with a basket woven with the chaos of stars
She is savoring every petal and thorn
while casting the seeds of manifestation
without rhyme or reason

She is innocent and free
and her eyes are the sound of laughter
She can not be contained or rationalized 
and she will not conform to my ideas
of how reality should be 

She stomps to the beat and throws her hips 
She is the prowl of the panther
and the leaping deer of supreme delight
She is pure in heart and the darkness of thunder

Her ruthlessness is the compassion
that severs my arrogance

and undoes my separation
so that I may know her deeply

and drink in her wild radiance.

With all that I am 
I devote myself to her insane beauty.

​When I am humble and true
She comes to me: “Dance! Why aren’t you dancing?!”

She will not be tamed 
yet she is the Grace that opens up 
the blessed wound of living

Let it be known—I love Her
this feral beast Woman
the one who is drenched in the Nectar of Love.

​I dance with her
because there is  
nothing left 
to do.

    - Maya Luna
Picture
Naked Athena
protesters vs. the military
July 18, 2020, Portland, OR
www.adn.com

Mother Raven

1/8/2023

 
Picture
We cannot live without the night,
gossamer veils of emptiness.
The Goddess is black,
but each pore of her body
emits a rainbow.
Motionless, she watches
beyond care, yet flows
like a river of healing.
Doesn't dark energy circle us all
like Mother Raven?
Take root in your grief.
That is where the sun is born.
Ascend through a bolder falling.
Her womb is immaculate silence.
Her void is moist with stars.
Yet she who cradles them all
has become your breath.
Haven't I told you there is wine
in the void between thoughts,
Joy and sorrow mingled in one cup?
Now taste, and who knows
if tonight you might not finally
embrace the fierce beauty
of your beaten heart?

- Alfred K. LaMotte

First Lesson

7/17/2022

 
Picture

Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's-float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

    - Philip Booth

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