I thought I'd put my heart into a poem,
STARDREAMING With Sherry Blue Sky
Poetry, memoir,blogs and photographs from my world on the west coast of Canada.

Tuesday, July 8, 2025
TO THE FOREST, DARK AND DEEP
I thought I'd put my heart into a poem,
Monday, July 7, 2025
First Love
though a bell tolled in my heart.
"Poor man's orchid," he said.
Too soon, it ended.
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
On the Summer Breeze
There's a scent I only smell on early mid-summer mornings - fresh, lake-scented - that transports me back to childhood, and Grandma's little war-time cottage, the lake just down the lane. Her garden scented the yard with pinks, peonies, sweet pea, hollyhocks. In the afternoons, I read, in the hammock under the weeping willow, its long fronds draped over me like a tent, with their distinctive odor. I swam in the lake once under a grey gunmetal sky, the air smelling sharp, metallic, just before the thunder rolled. Then that smell all its own - petrichor - just before the first fat raindrops fell on parched and sandy earth. In my old age, any of these essences takes me back to the days that shine brighter than bright, my best memories lake-scented, forever flower-filled and fragrant.
Summer at Grandma's -
the safest and most peaceful
place I ever knew.
A haibun for Sumana's prompt at What's Going On - Fragrance
Monday, June 30, 2025
Old Houses
speak in haunted whispers
of days when parents, cousins, friends
and gentlemen callers
filled the rooms
with bright and happy voices ...
dreams abandoned,
like childhood dolls
in the attic.
were young women in this house once,
dressed in sprigged cotton,
full of dreams and whispered hopes
under the summer moon.
The young men came, then went away,
mothers, aunts, uncles departing in their turn,
the two spinsters
living out their days together
in this shabby, downturning house,
a century rolling by
one day at a time
of waking, cooking, dishes, bed.
the sisters have walked,
slowly, with their canes,
along this country path.
Last time we passed, only one was left,
as faded as the crumbling house behind her,
unsmiling, eyes dim,
watching her days slowly
winding down.
as it has not been since 1915.
Then, how those echoes will whisper
like disappointed ghosts
through all the dusty, empty rooms.
Friday, June 27, 2025
Flight Maps of Stardust Voyagers
In my heart and through my being, Sky Woman sings, a song of the sea, a song of sky, inspiration to keep looking up, to envision the world as it is meant to be and to live towards that truth and that vision.
Life feels to me divinely guided, provided by an intelligence vaster than our human minds can comprehend. Every scientist, trained in facts, I am certain, must feel the touch of this mystery.
Primitive people felt the Presence of this force, and paid homage. The human spirit is designed to question, to seek the meaning of life. When we listen to it, it is this inner voice that yearns towards a higher purpose for our brief time on this earth, this lifetime that is our spirit's classroom.
We carry within us flight maps of stardust voyagers. It is in our DNA. This keeps us yearning towards the nighttime skies. It is what makes us strive for meaning with which to fill our empty spaces. We are all star travellers here, arriving on the planet still bemused by the Mystery.
We have been Sky Woman, we have been trees, we have soared with eagles, and sung with whales. We are singing still, that mournful song of living on this planet in a way that has strayed so far from the teachings of the Old Ones. Our prayers rise on the Old Ones' breath, to the listening ears of whatever gods may be, Wakan Tanka among the First People.
There is room for it all - by many roads we travel to the same source, which is called by many names. This same Intelligence which set sun and moon and earth spinning in their orbit, programmed into the DNA of every cell the unslakable desire to develop. To us was added the free will to reason our way through all the possibilities, and to choose our pathway through this life according to our highest truths.
My belief in this Intelligence helps me view myself and my fellow travellers with compassion, knowing whatever our fates on this plane, there will be a balancing out on the scales of a much truer justice than we find here, so that no one's life and death is meaningless.
I don't use one word to name whatever set the thousand galaxies spinning; I only know something cannot come from nothing, that before the swirling gases had to be the space they travelled in.
Looking inward at the teeming life of a single cell, its structure is too perfectly ordered to be random. Looking outward exponentially, spiraling across time and space on a cosmic journey, each star, each galaxy, with its programmed pattern, I believe all theories contain some truth. The only theory I find difficult to understand is that all life is random, that we live, we die, and it means nothing. I can't find anything in the human experience to support that.
Traveller, there are no limits to the possibilities, only perhaps in our capacity to understand them. I believe the soul is part of the story of creation, that it does not die, and that "there is a landscape larger than the one we see," and so much more than to survive that we are meant to do.
that so long for peace on earth
bear to wage a war?
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
A Windigo Wind
A windigo wind
is blowing across the land,
its puffed out cheeks
flushing out terrified people
hiding from malevolence
from every corner.
how I long for peace
Begone, bitter wind.
We resist. We hold firm
to our longing
for the soft breezes
of compassion and goodwill
to reclaim
the corridors of power.
how my weary heart
longs for peace
We will blow back
till we blow you out to sea,
so humanity and decency
can rule the land
we love.
we long for peace
We have power.
We are grandmothers, mothers, daughters,
grandfathers, fathers, sons
with wolf howls in our hearts,
an army of compassion
that sees a better world
than the one of mad
and misguided power.
We have waited a millennia
for peace.
for Mary's prompt at What's Going On - How I Long for Peace, inspired by the song with that title. Definitely a timely topic.
The Windigo is a mythical malevolent creature from the folklore of the Algonquin people.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Take Two Aspirin
understandably nervous citizens,
as ICE agents
capital letters from me).
who used to be the Cheerer-Upper-in-Chief,
can barely crack a smile at this ghastly version
of a wuddyacallit world.
Ha, I watched the news and then read Shay's Word List and this uncheery ditty is the result. Apologies, but there is only so much one old woman can take. The last four months feel like years.
I still have gratitude for the beauty and peace around me. But am all too aware of the suffering that fascist governments are causing all over the world as well as closer to home. Stay safe, compadres.