Fourteen Years Gone - in Honour of Pup

Pup ~ March, 1997 - January 15, 2011

 

I feel it coming, this poem I will birth

on the thirteenth year of your passing

from this earth.

So close to tears, I realized, of course, it is you.

Just how much and how long I would miss you,

back then I never knew.

Like a burrowing owl, you have lodged in my heart,

like a prickle-burr that hurts,

from which I do not want to part.

You live there, night and day,

in a corner labeled Grief.

From the missing and your-being-gone

there is no relief.

Ghost voices whispering on the wind,

and wolf howls in my dreams,

you look right into my sad heart;

your wolf-eyes gleam.

The barn owl says to light the lamp

on the windowsill for you.

But how can you find me in this place

that was never home to you?

I'm homeless in the universe, alone, without you

and I fear you're out there somewhere,

feeling homeless too.

Lead me back, wolf-spirit,

to the land we loved together.

I will walk there again

as we did in any weather.

When I can hear the rhythm of

the turning of the tides,

my spirit may still find a home

once more, where peace abides.

Maybe your ghost shadow

will accompany the hours

as I walk forever beaches that,

for a time, were ours.

*** *** ***

I went to bed and slept, and then they came:

four beautiful, snowy white wolves

who already knew my name.

The first one came close,

oh! the beauty of her face!

pushed a friendly nose towards me,

as I stood still, accepting,

but respectful of her space.

We were at the beach, the wolves and I.

A visitation from the spirit-world

of the not-alive,

and from deep in my spirit,

which needs both wolves and ocean waves

to thrive,

because it has never been enough

simply to survive.

The barn owl called sleepily

in the early light to wake me.

Four white wolves live within me now,

never to forsake me.

And you?

big, black, laughing, hilarious

creature of the dawn?

You live in my heart

forever, now.

You are never

fully gone.

Fourteen years gone today - as many years as he was alive, and grief is still there. I will always miss him until - I hope - we are together again.

Gifts From the Heart

 

Home-made,
something from the heart,
like the mittens with strings attached,
that my grandma threaded through my snowsuit sleeves
to keep them from being lost

like the faded blue quilt
she tucked around me at bedtime.
(Never again was a quilt
so comforting)

like the pink blanket
my mother knitted for my sister
that grew to twenty feet long
that my sister dragged around on the floor
till she was four,
when my grandma started 
slowly snipping lengths 
off of it
until it was four inches long,
and then,
forever lost

Home-made
like the drawings and cards
saved from little boys
who now live in the spirit world
to whom I never got to say
goodbye

Home-made
like the small heart my grandson left
in the dust on my daughter's printer
the week before he died,
to tell her he loved her,
still there, but fainter, now,
a message she wants
to stay forever

No purchased gift
can ever equal
these small gifts
from the heart
that we take for granted
until life shows us
how incomparable
they really are.

for Sumana's prompt at What's Going On - Home-Made. I didn't know what I was going to remember until I started tapping the keys.

Memory, Like Little Birds

 

source

The small barn owl, asleep on her perch,

nearly topples into the manger, ruffling

her wings indignantly, glancing around

to see if anyone has noticed.

I know exactly how she feels.

My memory is full of sky and birds;

forever I am walking by a stormy sea,

a seagull passing me like an outtake

from Jonathan Livingston Seagull,

the bird who began my quest.

Imagine a flock of tiny shorebirds,

lifting, swirling and landing as one:

I will never not be thrilled by this,

or by the way the sun is already coaxing,

in January, crocuses and daffodils

out of the chilly earth, as the light lasts

a little longer each day.

I sit at my window like a conductor.

The show begins when I look out:

dogs go by, heads turning to see 

if the Woman With the Treats is here.

Tiny children from the daycare

pass with their guardians, reminding me

of being small, of my children

and grandchildren's childhoods.

How tender is the heart of a child.

How much we didn't know back then.

This is where memory takes me,

into a circular flight much like

the sandpipers, twirling and twirling

at the edge of the sea.

for Shay's Word List

What the Heart Remembers

 

The old dog's heart remembers being tied out

in the cold on a chain, hungry and miserable,

and gives gratitude and devotion to the one

who rescued him and
gave him a home.

The mother whale remembers the calf who died,

and how she carried her, in grief, for seventeen days

on her nose, unable to let her go, till finally

her baby fell away.*
I remember, too.

The creatures of the world remember

when life was less difficult, when habitat

and food were plentiful, when human

and non-human beings lived together

in harmony. They grieve. Across this

battle-scarred and warring world,

this world of corporate greed and inhumanity,

they grieve.

The human heart grieves too. We look out

at a world divided, without peace, millions

of refugees adrift with no safe place to go,

at governments enriching themselves

and impoverishing their citizens.

We remember a small orphaned calf,

swimming bravely alone through the sea,

till she was seen no more.
We grieve.

But the heart also remembers childhood

in a simpler time. It remembers marching 

for civil rights, for human rights, 

for womens' rights, for indigenous rights,
to stop the war, to stop gun violence,

to object to police violence because
Black Lives Matter.
And now we will have to

march again for those same rights
being taken away

in a world gone far astray.

It remembers those we loved and cared for

as they grew, and the ones who didn't

make it through. It remembers homes

loved and lost and does not mind the cost

because, for those golden years, 

it lived in joy - tramping a wind-tossed shore

with a big black wolf - watching the sun

go down at the edge of the sea -
giving one's heart

to the wild world and its wonder -

and those memories

will never go asunder.

*Update: This same mother whale, Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf on her nose for seventeen days and a thousand miles in 2018, in grief,  was seen New Year's day, 2025, carrying another dead calf on her nose, telling we humans: See? See what you have done to the ocean and the earth, because you are so many and take so much? 

The Indigenous people where I live remember a time when they and the natural world lived in harmony, before colonization. Their culture still adheres to their traditional knowledge and wisdom. How horrified they must be at what we have done to their ancestral gardens.

It seems I have to resign myself to grief in order to bear the coming years. It is hard to write a happy poem any more. But I will keep trying. Baby whales dying is very hard for me.

My heart is also remembering the poet Sarah Connor, who passed away December 27. Sarah was well known in the poetry community, contributing to earthweal and to dVerse Poets Pub. She had a shining spirit and she will be missed.

for Mary's prompt at What's Going On - What the Heart Remembers.

Bring In the Clowns

 

I took two arms, a keyboard,

a distracted brain,

and a clown in a side-cart,

during a bout of emotional mania,

and tried to create art.

It lacked finesse and had poor rhyme,

was so not normal much of the time.

My system, on overload, cries out

for release, in a world in freefall

so lacking in peace.

Kind folks keep reminding me

mood swings are to be expected,

our hearts and minds being so connected,

when the sky is falling on every side,

and there's nowhere safe

in which to hide.

Where Shay's Word List  took me yesterday. 

BEING A GOOD CREATURE

 

by Bryony Bensly

There was a time, the singer crooned,

when all the creatures

shared the earth.
*from the song "Magic" by Dana Lyons

His song brings tears when I imagine

all living as they once did, harmoniously -

otter, bear, wolf, whale and tree,

so wild and free, each creature being
so perfectly

what it was meant to be.

We took a garden Paradise

and cut down all the trees,

poisoned all the bees,

polluted and over-fished the seas.
Now we have hurricanes instead
of a gentle breeze.

And we humans? Toxic rhetoric and hate

make me fear it is too late
to go back to the starting gate
and readjust our fate.

But the earth-love in his song
helps make my spirit strong:

we can't abandon Mother Earth,

for all her creatures have such worth.

So I'll sit under a tree, listen

to all she has to say,

and I'll promise to be good

as all earth's creatures should,

because it's all I have to give

to help her live.

by Jody Bergsma

For my prompt at What's Going On - how to be a good creature in a world gone topsy-turvy. Here is wishing us all the ability to face the challenges of 2025 as the good creatures we are.

The Crystal Ships Are Leaving

 

And now the crystal ships are leaving*
while you are dancing in disguise.
A flowerless goodbye shines in your eyes.

The moonlight glimmers on the sea,
in its beauty I'm believing, yet
nevertheless, the crystal ships are leaving.

You were as gentle as a dove;
your heart was fractured by lost love.
A flowerless goodbye shone in your eyes.

The starfields called your name,
a visitor I am always grieving,
and the crystal ships are now forever leaving.

We could not keep you here,
it has now become so clear:
a flowerless goodbye shone in your eyes.

How do we let you go?
How much we love you - did you know?
The crystal ships are leaving,
for a flowerless goodbye shone in your eyes.

for Shay's Word List: an attempt at a de chirico

* a line from Jim Morrison's song The Crystal Ship