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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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A Meeting

6/26/2022

 
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​She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

​    - Mary Oliver


it is so full here in myself

5/29/2022

 
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Maiden, Mother, Crone by Rima Staines

have your eyes ever fallen upon a beast like me
i have the spine of a mulberry tree
the neck of a sunflower
sometimes i am the desert
at times the rain forest
but always the wild
my belly brims over the waistband of my pants
each strand of hair frizzing out like a lifeline
it took a long time to become
such a sweet rebellion
back then i refused to water my roots
till i realized
if i am the only one
who can be the wilderness
then let me be the wilderness
the tree trunk cannot become the branch
the jungle cannot become the garden
so why should i

    - Rupi Kaur

Speaking Tree

4/3/2022

 
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Photograph by Ken Kingsbury. Used with permission.

​​I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree.
                                                                   —Sandra Cisneros

Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken--
A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there--

Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,
But they do not understand poetry--

Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by
Wind, or water music--
Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft--

Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth
Between sunrise and sunset--

I cannot walk through all realms--
I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark--

What shall I do with all this heartache?

The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway--
To the edge of the river of life, and drink--

I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:

Imagine what would it be like to dance close together
In this land of water and knowledge. . .

To drink deep what is undrinkable.

   
- Joy Harjo


Great As You Are

3/6/2022

 
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Great As You Are by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

​​Be like a bear in the forest of yourself.
Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath.
Every hair has life
and standing, as you do, swaying
from one foot to the other
all the forest stands with you.
Each minute sound, one after another,
is distinct in your ear. Here
in the blur of mixed sensations, you can
feel the crisp outline of being, particulate.
Great as you are, huge as you are and
growling like the deepest drum,
the continual vibration that makes music
what it is,
not some light stone skipped on the surface of things,
you travel below
sounding the depths where only the dauntless go.
Be like the bear and
do not forget
how you rounded your
massive shape over the just ripened
berry which burst
in your mouth that moment
how you rolled in
the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling
with your sensate skin,
how you shut
your eyes and swam far and farther
still, starlight
shaping itself to your body,
starship rocking the grand, slow waves
under the white trees, in the
snowy night.

    - Susan Griffin

Be the mystery at the crossroads

2/20/2022

 
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Earth: I Flow by Cindy Wood, www.cindywoodart.com
 
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell.  As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

    - Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
Picture
In honor of Margery Wood, 1918-1975
Art by Cindy Wood, 2014

"I painted this in honor of my mother who died 47 years ago, when I was 10 years old. In her journal is her favorite poem, this Rilke poem, albeit a slightly different translation than the one above. Alongside a photo of her is a postcard of the Annunciation and a multidimensional messenger, the hummingbird." - Cindy

Glimpse

2/13/2022

 
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Glimpse by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

​It was as if a window suddenly blew open
and the sky outside the mind came flooding in.
My childhood shriveled to a close,
just like that, thread of smoke
that rose and touched a cloud - or the cloud’s
replica adrift on the slow river of thinking -
and disappeared inside it. In that dark water,
a new lily was opening, sky-white out of the muck.
It was only a glimpse, quick,
like a bird ruffling,
but I saw the flower’s
beautiful stark shape, an artichoke
brightened from within by the moon.
A path lay shadowy under my feet,
and I followed it.

    - Chase Twichell

Tethered

12/12/2021

 
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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
Picture
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

The Story

11/14/2021

 
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​Step closer to the story that scares you~
the one that has you gasping for air
in the night, searching for ground.
This one wants to take you past
the lip of the void to the birthplace
of stars, where all stories dissolve
into the blessing of original song.

Leap into the love that terrifies--
you know just what it will do.
It will un-hinge every door in your house.
It will blow in like a hurricane
and re-arrange your furniture.
It will howl like a banshee through your bones
and leave you delightfully hollow.
Without this love you are only playing
at this life– and you are so tired of that!

Turn your wild horses out
into the fields in the morning,
when first light purples the hills.
They are hungry for this earth
under hoof, this thunder of full gallop.
They may trample all the places
you have so carefully tended.
They may leave you in a cloud of dust.
And yet, this is the only way
they will return to you truly,
without a fence to keep them in.

Let the current lift you
out of the churning eddy. 
There is only one place where this river flows--
through slot canyons and the eyes of midnight,
through singing valleys and greening glens.
These holy waters will have their way with you.
They are dreaming you into a body of light.
Why fight what you most long for?

    - Laura Weaver

Dear darkening ground

10/31/2021

 
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Dear darkening ground,
you've endured so patiently the walls we've built,
perhaps you'll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor--let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven,

before you become forest again,
and water,
and widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.

Just give me a little more time!

I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they're worthy of you and real.

    - Rilke, Book of Hours, I 61

Bearing Witness

9/5/2021

 
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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

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  • Home
  • Wild Words Poetry Blog
  • Ecos de la Marea
  • About
    • About Xochitl
    • Spiritual Midwifery
    • Client Experiences
  • Services
    • The Emotion Code & The Body Code
    • Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy
    • Quantum Touch
    • Reconnective Healing
    • Death Midwifery & Home Funeral Guide
    • Animal Healing
  • Events
    • Trips & Retreats
    • Workshops
    • Ceremonies
  • Hours & Fees
  • Contact