Light
I want to write of the light
but I do not know
whether words can illuminate
the way it hangs
upon branches and bird wings
and broken things
returning beings to beauty.
Can words spin substance
from sunshine and decay?
Can words cajole
celebration from night-weary
birds?
Can words warm surfaces
of stones and sorrows?
Can words reveal richness
in mundane
and battered
things?
I do not know.
But if we would write
a tomorrow
wider than wounds
we have worn,
we might wield words
like benedictions
and remember
blessings
within brokenness,
beginnings
within endings,
and beauty
within all beings.
*****
Benediction
May you taste the colors of sunset,
may you touch the chorus of dawn,
may your eyes turn toward the beauty
even when it’s gone.
May you weave a path of blessing
through ecstasy and grief.
May you tend the flame within you
may you feed it with belief.
May you find yourself in strangers
and meet them within you.
May you trust that we are windows
the world is peering through.
May you linger in each moment,
receiving with your heart
the gift of possibilities
that presence can impart.
May you become a portal
to the love behind your toil,
may you become a silence
within the world’s turmoil.
May the prayers that grow within you
bloom in many lands.
We are woven of connections
and peace is in our hands.
*****
October
Light in leaves in wind in sky.
Bright October brings beauty
to dead things
and the wingless learn
to fly.
Berries try to stash the summer
in their skin.
Squirrels bury food
and future forests.
Flowers fall back into all
the abundance that birthed
them and decay
paves the way for life
upon life.
When our dreams fall
we might recall
that forests are fed
by the fallen.
What we call death is only
the birth
of bodies and dreams
without boundaries.
What we call death is only
the discovery
that we belong
to the beauty
that burns in all beings.
*****
Blackberries
Do you know what love is?
I don’t either.
But I do know how to lean,
a little too far,
in search of summers sweetness
condensed in bumpy, berry bodies.
I know how to fall
into ecstasy and thorns
and sun-drenched joy.
Perhaps we need not know
what love is
because it sets such juicy snares
at the intersection of our hunger
and the world’s need.
Why would the world
need our greed?
Why would it ask us
to cram its sticky sweetness
into our hungry hands?
Because it is dying.
Blackberries are drying
before they are formed.
Only by the creek
can they become themselves.
So I eat
and I celebrate
and I mourn
for the world that is slipping
through our startled hands,
for the animals who find fallen leaves
and shriveled fruit
where once they feasted,
for the desolation
our children will inherit
when plants and animals fall.
I mourn for all the wounds and wars
and piles of unfinished papers
that keep us from
filling our desperate hearts,
pockets, hands
with dark, dripping parcels
of planetary love
until we split at the seems
and spill out
into the drying world.
*****
The Fallen
We have no time to mourn, no time to attend the funeral
for the forgotten. And anyway, the casket is empty
because the forest was clear cut
before scientists could catalog
and make real its now-extinct inhabitants.
The casket is empty because we sent a drone
to kill the alleged terrorist and it killed
some alleged civilians instead.
We regret the mistake but we still have a stake
in the illusory systems of safety that teach us to kill.
So we cannot name or know the fallen,
cannot care about children, artists, scientists, farmers, friends —
all irreplaceable players in our planet’s pursuit of peace.
The casket is empty because the deceased died in the desert
attempting to access the land of the free
and the home of the brave.
Or perhaps they did not die.
Maybe they made it to the promised land
and scraped together scraps by cleaning other people’s filth
and stapling shingles onto steep slopes in the blazing sun.
They gave birth to a child.
And then they were deported —
without the child who was a citizen of a country that had no place
for his people though its founders had helped themselves
to the heart of an already-inhabited continent.
The casket is empty because the broken bodies
of the disappeared rest uneasily in stinking pits.
The casket is empty because we cannot cram whole planets
into wooden boxes and anyway where would we bury them?
And who would attend the funeral?
Not the former inhabitants of the deceased planet.
The casket is empty because we are still struggling
to save its intended occupants.
And we will not rest until every remedy has been tried.
We will throw the talent that money cannot buy
into the task of resurrecting our dying mother.
We will stop everything, drop everything, to mourn.
We will gather gifts forgotten by gross national products
and other measures of money we’ve made
from forests and fruits and uprooted roots:
summers and sunsets, bird choruses and Bach cantatas,
sweet sap and thick syrup, unexpected irises crouching in swamps.
And then? And then we will stop scripting trite conclusions
to our unsolvable sorrows and slip into the impossible
tenderness that only uncertainty can summon.
*****
A Serious Frivolity
Savoring the substance
of existence
is a serious
frivolity.
Someone must do it.
Someone must love
luminous hours when leaves
marry light and refuse
to stop
shining.
Someone must speak
the sweetness
of lilacs
before it is lost
beneath smog.
Someone must bask
in the beauty of blessing
because the news knows only
brokenness.
When you give yourself
to a particular place
the power
and peace
of that place
give themselves
through you.
So savoring the substance
of existence
is a serious frivolity.
Someone must do it.
Will that someone
be you?
*****
To a Small Boy with Eager Eyes
What if your hopes are killed
before they’re even born?
What if your days are filled
with loss too large to mourn?
What if there are no birds
to usher you to sleep?
What if there are no words
for pain that cuts so deep?
What if there are no bees
to pollinate your fruits?
What if your ardent pleas
can’t water dying roots?
What if you cannot breathe
because the air is black?
What if your dreams all seethe
with life you can’t call back?
What if the oceans rise?
What if the forests fall?
And what if their demise
heralds the death of all?
What if there is no earth
for you to walk upon
and everything of worth
has shriveled up and gone?
What will we offer you
in place of tomorrow?
What words will sustain you
through this endless sorrow?
Do you harbor replies
to our unspoken prayer?
Will the light in your eyes
enable us to care
for you and your passion,
for our unfurling love,
for shoots of compassion,
for joy we’re woven of?
*****
Invocation
I want you to remember
the sight of bats in flight.
I want you to encounter
the unstained hues of night.
I want you to taste wild grapes
and spongy cattail shoots,
to watch as new life escapes
from shriveled winter roots.
I want the red winged blackbird
to visit you in spring
and I want you to have heard
the crickets when they sing.
I want you to see ridges
encased in morning light.
I want you to find bridges
constructed on delight.
I want you to discover
a field of fireflies,
to know the world as lover,
to understand her cries.
I want someone to hold you
and marvel at your dreams,
the dreams that you can cling to
when life splits at the seams.
I want someone to love you
when you cannot do so,
someone who will inform you
of all the things you know.
I want us to bequeath you
a world that’s wild and free
so you can enter into
the beauty that you see.
*****
Ancestor
When I walked into your world
I knew that death was only a synonym
for continuity.
I could feel you reaching through me.
Your heart,
sculpted and strengthened by sorrow,
leaped in mine.
Your steady hand,
accustomed to sowing seeds and dreams,
held mine.
Your hard-earned harvest
of wounds
endured and inflicted
fed me.
You taught me that we
become free by embracing
what we would flee.
You showed me that the parts of our hearts
that have wielded
and been broken
by the world’s pain also contain the key
to its healing.
You promised me that we could become
the beauty
we serve and see.
Your celebration alighted within me.
Now I am hungry for a reality
built upon the immensity
of our inheritance
which is love.
*****
Strangers in the Lands of Ourselves
Experts only
can address
sickened bodies,
tortured minds,
endless wars,
dying planets,
species who have made their final bow
upon the darkening stage of existence.
Did we acquiesce
to this myth of severance?
We belonged once to slanting houses
thick with memory
where we consecrated summer days
seeking rabbits.
Patience sprouted then in the light
of discovery,
its roots nourished by mycelium
of delight.
In those days
we knew that we could not run
without falling,
could not swim
without sinking,
could not fly
without trusting
that we were held by a powerful mystery.
Now that we have lost all that,
now that we have become
strangers
in the lands of ourselves,
we are free
to remain constant
by forever changing,
to become a piece of the source
we have misplaced.
*****
From Which it all Began
Tell me, what
would you do today
if you knew your life
to be a celebration
of this world?
Would you stop
to gather sunlight
dropping soundlessly
upon pines
beyond your window pane?
Would you court
dreams too wide
for the container
of consciousness?
Would you linger
in the terrible beauty
of uncertainty
as if the fullness of the world
depended upon your presence?
Would you caste your hopes
upon possibilities that abide
only in departure?
Would you become the motion
of your song,
losing itself in overtones
of delight
or despair
and returning, finally,
to the stillness
from which it all began?
*****
A Poem
If life were a poem
to the universe,
I would find beauty
in the saying
of the darkest sorrows
and the arms of my night
would overflow
with stars.
If life were a poem
to the divine,
I would find heaven
in recesses
of doubt
and compassion
in recoiling.
If life were a poem
to the earth,
I would find renewal
in the falling
of ancient protection
and possibilities would blossom
from decay.
If my life were a poem
to myself,
I would become a vessel
deep enough to embrace
betrayal
and belonging
with unabashed gladness.
If my life were a poem
to the one I would become,
I would inhabit this day
with reverence
and choose to make
of surrender
a home.
If my life were a poem
to you,
I would find in my shame
the wounds of the world
and seek in my celebration
the love
that is waiting
to become
our hands.
*****
Elegy to a Dying Snail
I stepped on you
last night
in the darkness.
Your life—
a torrent of green liquid—
spilled down my wrist,
your antennae gently pulsed.
I saw in your fading
existence
a kinship
crafted of
mutual
mortality.
I have been waiting,
these years,
to live,
to become real
enough to matter,
to become free
enough to matter not,
to understand the heart
of the living earth,
beating within mine.
I have been waiting for my shell
to crack
and instead I cracked yours,
effortlessly,
beneath my shoe,
a portal from one mystery,
to the next.
I am sorry that your life was lost,
to one not yet alive.
But in your death,
my life,
un-lived,
became the real journey
it has always been.
*****
Idleness
Idleness is a commitment
to stop seeking god
beyond
failed schemes,
plundered dreams,
tired hands,
and thirsty lands.
For god is in our hunger,
god is in our pain,
and god is in the loss
that will teach us how to gain
the only thing worth holding,
the thing we cannot own,
a trust in the unfolding,
a love of the unknown.
*****
Before
Before we knew
that air had no agency,
revelations traveled upon the breeze.
Before we suspected
that science had dispensed with miracles
while religion had relegated them to realms
far from the fecund earth,
we encountered miracles
in mud
and marsh-marigolds.
Before we succumbed
to the societal wisdom
that sealed intelligence and creativity
within our skulls,
we exchanged meaning with mist
and chatted with chipmunks.
Before we relegated reality
to measurable manipulations
of matter,
the morning mentioned possibilities
and we played with the power
of presence.
Before we forgot
that we were supported
by other sentient powers
and dreamed
by other dreams,
we knew that the possible
was a dialog
that depended
upon delight.
Before we agreed to pursue possibilities
that were compatible
with capacities
we could claim,
failure was just an invitation
to perfect the mechanism
of flight.
*****
Many Ways
There are many ways to live
and one is to give
your heart
to the precognitive power of passion
whose pearls are formed
of sweetness
and suffering.
Passion is a portal
to God
and
God
is a refuge you will enter
and become.
All that you love
will fall to the fires
of time.
But the loving itself
will remain—
a testament to the life
that lived you
into this celebration.
*****
Falling
There is no security
in freedom
only endless falling
toward the hands that tossed you
into the world.
So script your plans
with emptiness—
the world might find you.
We are the horizon
we seek.
We are the beauty we cherish.
The universe is gazing
through our eyes
and unfolding in our dreams.
The boundary between the possible
and the impossible
rises in the mind.
It is only an invitation
to fly without wings.
Shall we bequeath our days
to celebration?
For life is a requiem
to the alleged failures
and successes
of an alleged self
and it is a hymn
to the possibilities
that see themselves
in us.
*****
Ode to Failure
Life might be too brief
and brilliant
to be squandered on success.
If we’ve not wandered
into failure,
how will we learn to caress
both the beauty
and the brokenness?
If we’ve not dressed
in fear and doubt,
how will we climb out
of our skin
by burrowing more deeply in
to the silence at the center
of each heart and world?
If we’ve not lost the love
that looses no one,
will we seek its source
in everyone?
If we’ve not buried childhood dreams,
will we hear the screams
of children whose dreams are sliced by violence
and the imposed silence
of shame?
If we’ve not passed on
our pain,
will we see the need
in each alleged misdeed?
If we’ve not looked for love
in loss
will we understand that decay
paves the way
to enduring life?
*****
What Forest Knows
If you would know what the forest knows
ask the departed.
For every life,
lost to itself,
becomes the unfolding.
If you would know what the forest knows
enter its hidden falls—
there each droplet,
shattered,
returns to the deep.
If you would know what the forest knows
drink the cadences of its silence
until they echo in your song.
Then in the sweetness of blackberries
you might find yourself
devoured.
Let the forest shape you
as if you belonged to its dreams
for you were always
an instrument
in the hands
of this celebration.
*****
The Dream We Stand Inside
May you find divinity
in each being that you see;
in the whole society;
in the person you call me;
in ants and in bumblebees;
in pines and in other trees;
in the hungry morning breeze;
in the rough loquacious seas.
May the lively morning light
linger long within your sight.
May the broad wings of delight
give your song the gift of flight.
May the stream’s strength flow through you,
may the star’s silence sing you,
may the prairie’s peace hold you,
may the earth’s arms enfold you.
May your dreams grow just as wide
as the dream we stand inside.
When the shell of you has died
may the love you are abide.
*****
Finn
I follow you
through the forest
remembering
how large the world is
and sandcastles blossom
beneath our feet.
Our leaf boats
return like memories
through the mist
of years,
carrying forgotten revelry.
Your hunger
ignites my own
and I vow
to smear the fruits
of this earth
across my face
in unabashed celebration.
Our ungodly culinary adventures
feed a hunger
dismissed
to recipes of success
and I recall the sticky delight
of moments inhabited and goals discarded.
Your wildly stacked blocks
defy gravity
while my mathematically correct
towers perish
so I resolve to follow your example
and place my glass birds
upon precarious perches
where they too can see the sky.
The light in your eyes
and the wildness in your embrace
teach me that I belong still
to the love which gave us
to this world
and I vow to become the beauty
and the glee
you touch in me.
*****
The Offering
You are a dream
in the heart of the infinite,
a song in the soul
of the world.
You are a hope
in the womb of the earth,
a memory
on the journey of your people.
So lay down the wounds
and strengths
you mistook for yourself.
You know how to inhabit
your story
with enough faith
to abandon it.
Something deep within
knows the patience
of egrets
poised like statues
over the life they will become.
When transformation becomes
a given
though accidental
byproduct
of play,
love
will become your hands.
In the tribute of revelry
healing is born
so caste your stars
into the world’s skies.
And seek, in the hushed cathedral
of your heart,
the reflection of the divine.
*****
A Memory
Poised above emptiness
you cry for the cocoon’s embrace
forgetting that it was woven to prepare
this flight.
Known tools are not relevant
in this new trade.
You must apprentice yourself
to the sun and the rain.
A memory more ancient
than your one fragile life
pulses through the blood
of your dreams.
You belong
to the blossoming dawn
and the splashing of hummingbird wings.
Like the willow,
you will endure by breaking,
tossing limbs to
el rio de la vida.
Condensed for a moment
from the breath of the universe
you belong to her dreams
and her story.
Nourished for a lifetime
in the heart of the earth
you will return to her love
and her glory.
*****
Flight
When we savor the sunrise
it shines out from our eyes.
When we linger in loon song
our own voices grow strong.
On the wings of surrender
we enter life’s splendor
and through the flight of delight
we reflect what is bright.
We become what we bless,
we become what we seek
and we become beauty
that we bother to speak.
When the heart cannot hold
one more drop of beauty
it seeps into the world
staining people with glee.
*****
Finding a Vocation
I want to celebrate
and articulate
the gossip of geese,
the serenity of swans,
and the antics of arboreal rodents.
I want to study the sunlight
as it lingers in leaves
and in longings,
blessing and expressing
the beauty of all things.
I want to practice the peace
of passion
so that it might serve itself
through me.
I want to caress
forgotten fragments
of self and society,
spurned seekers who insist
that we cultivate compassion.
I want to empty this vessel
of a life and imbibe
the emptiness.
And I want to sing of the sweetness
that sustains us
as we stumble
toward the sweetness
that we are.
*****
Feeding the Hunger of the World
In the winged heart
of world enfolded in self
unfolded in world—
Work becomes
play
becomes
love.
Giving becomes
receiving
becomes
the ecstatic mingling of souls
birthing a new dream.
Teaching becomes
learning
becomes
the touch of the universe
upon the strings of the soul.
Birth becomes death
becomes the dreaming
of souls within souls,
feeding the hunger of the world.
*****
Becoming Monkeys
In those days,
questions deferred to play
and wishes leaped
through the trees
intent upon becoming
monkeys
and unconcerned
by the prospect
of immanent
shattering.
There were mud holes
not sanitized by the
world’s fear
and plans
not circumscribed
by societal dreams.
There were knights
in adventure clad,
their armor of powerlessness
not yet assumed.
They knew that life
belonged to the kingdom
of fairy tales
which awaited
their entry
into the battle
of joy.
*****
Squirrels
What is the question
that ponders me
when I lay down my allegiance
to answers?
Sometimes it seeps into the silence
between thoughts
or saunters with squirrels
upon scenarios
too slim
for solid bodies.
Then falling becomes flying,
up enters down,
right remembers itself in wrong,
and possibilities emerge
from the impossible.
Perhaps the ideal circumstances
I have sought
begin
and end
in possibilities that I pause to ponder
and in beauty that I bother to embrace.
For what limits does truth perceive
and what circumstances
or beings
does love fail to gather
in its net?
*****
Sun
You pluck birds
from slumber
and your soliloquy
seeps into song.
You linger in leaves
and you luminosity
becomes branches.
You blossom in flowers
and your brilliance
bears fruit.
You roam upon rocks
and resurrect
startled reptiles.
I want to rest
in your radiance
which coaxes substance
from surrender
and strength from sweetness.
And I want to bask
in your beauty
until it filters
through the foliage
of my dreams.
*****
Desert Light
I wait for the day to recall
the cold from my bones
and then I am running
on fire with a desperate dream.
Rocks stand immense
against the morning
and raptors rise
upon the light.
In this land I have found
a piece of my soul
unknown—
it belongs to the edge between
life and death.
It belongs to the spaces
between canyons.
It belongs to flowers
tucked beneath the blazing sky.
It belongs to the hunger of the hawk.
It belongs to a longing
fragile, fierce, and free.
Life is too sweet to contain
a destination
or an assurance.
There is only this searing heat
and sharp beauty
weaving life
upon the cliff face
and carrying the memory of water.
*****
Contentment
Mist is a miracle
only
if we pause
to marvel.
It is an obstacle
if we insist
upon seeing
the scenes that it seems to obscure.
Mist reveals
as much as it conceals
as it rises in response
to the rhythms of the world.
Mist is
a messy and mysterious exchange
of motion
and memory.
Mist is a conversation
weighted with water,
wafted by wind,
lifted by light.
It dissipates into hidden dimensions
daring us to follow.
It enfolds the familiar landscape
of the self
in fabric of the infinite,
inviting us to surrender
to the silence at the center
of the question.
*****
Making Mosaics
Tenderness
falls
with the forests.
Euphemisms
hide
our horror
and our hearts.
Pain
is pathologized,
criminalized,
personalized.
Pleasure
is romanticized,
fantasized,
trivialized.
But pain and pleasure
are portals
to presence
and presence is a pathway
to peace.
In their grasp
masks fall,
plans fall,
hands fall
and hearts become free.
Beauty blossoms
as we bless the broken,
making mosaics
with shattered
glass
of the soul.
*****
Born of Dissolution
You cannot know
why this pain chooses you
but perhaps
you can make yourself
vast
like the night
whose stars shine
only in darkness.
Loss is a storm
which can carry us farther
than we alone might travel.
Waves of grief hollow caves
of the heart
until they are wide enough
to encompass the dream.
Rainbows
are born
of dissolution.
The twilight of the known
precedes
rebirth.
Communion comes from falling,
for precisely where you are
broken
you can converse with the world.
So stay awhile
in the cyclone
if you would become
beauty
that cannot
be broken.
*****
The Gift of Loss
The loss of life we never knew
leaves an emptiness inside.
We remember rains dismissed
above deserts
of our making;
passenger pigeons
shot down
in a sea of feathers;
pavements
placed upon
forgotten forest floors;
bodies broken
beneath the weight
of the industrial dream;
children
taught to compete
but not to cultivate
compassion;
seeds and stories stolen
from cultures
that care for creation.
The loss of life
we never knew
leaves a longing deep inside.
Forests are built upon
creatures who have died.
And our dreams are forged
from losses not denied.
Only when facades fall
can the love we are abide.
*****
For the Children
We are the hope that lives through us,
riding the breath of our dreams.
Our lives,
so small,
so brief,
so beautiful,
so powerful,
invite us to abandon security for an authenticity older than form.
The sunrise is calling—
will you take my hand
as we leap from the illusory precipice
of surety
into the dawn of our unfurling?
Will we laugh like children chasing waves,
our bodies singing
in the sharp cascade of life?
Will we cry out
with the fierce longing
lost no longer
in canyons of sorrow we had forgotten to feel?
In the secret twilight of sorrow,
warmth follows the light
into eternity,
inviting us to kindle our own
flame,
to step, even broken, into the fire
of the dream.
*****
