Friday, July 11, 2025

WILD WOLF, WAITING



There is a wild wood.
In my den I stir
as the new morning wakes me.
I sniff the wind
and sense your pain.
It breaks me,
for I'm forced to forge a path
you cant yet follow,
and I know
this leaves you feeling
rather hollow.

I am a wild wolf.
To be with you, I always had to
keep it tethered.
Now I can throw off
all my bindings,
not forgetting all the years
we spent together.

I am a wild thing,
but my heart returns
to watch you
when you're sleeping,
rest my nose upon your bed
and whuff a greeting,
though you're asleep
and never feel us meeting.

How can a heart be
wild and tame,
together?
We forged a bond
nothing in life can sever.
A bridge between
our two wild hearts
we traveled;
a bond that tight
can never be
unraveled.

I had to leave you,
but I never wanted to
and I am circling
the forest waiting for
your heart to find me.
Listen for my call;
you are not far
behind me.


One from 2013.

To the Trees I Go



I walk the path
in a green and peaceful woods,
the branches arching o'er
as if in prayer,
as if a hidden sepulchre
we share,
and I find a measure of peace
while I am there.

White Crow caws once
as if in sad adieu,
(looked long into my eyes
before he flew.)
I watch him go, a mix
of awe and rue.
(What message he imparted,
I never knew.)

It's to the trees I go
when I need rest.
My spirit sore,
make of their peace a nest;
tucked in my heart,
I go my way, thrice blessed.
It's to the trees I go,
when I need rest.


A second poem answering the prompt "Rest".

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

TO THE FOREST, DARK AND DEEP




I thought I'd put my heart into a poem,
and take it to the forest, dark and deep,
find the mossy path, the broken limb,
a perch from which to read the trees to sleep.

So sonorous, all words verdant and green,
so soft the moss, the pages all between.
I turn them, leaf and fern, salal and flower,
sweet and protected, in my leafy bower.

The dark will tiptoe in on doe-like feet,
will settle tenderly upon the boughs,
and I softly away, and smiling sweet,
the forest safe and dreaming deep, for now.

Oh forest dear, my sanctuary blessed,
it is to you I come, when I seek rest.

 One from 2014 for Susan's prompt at What's Going On: Rest

Monday, July 7, 2025

First Love



He said, "I think I love you."
My response was intensely joyful,
though a bell tolled in my heart.

He plucked a blossom off a tree
and offered it to me, his brown eyes
smiling.

"Poor man's orchid," he said.

Too soon, it ended.

Other loves pale in comparison
to first love, so innocent and sweet,
at just fifteen. 


Tuesday, July 1, 2025

On the Summer Breeze

 


Don Collier photo

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

 


Mary Ann Potter image

Old houses
speak in haunted whispers
of days when parents, cousins, friends
and gentlemen callers
filled the rooms
with bright and happy voices ...

.... all gone, now,
dreams abandoned,
like childhood dolls
in the attic.

The two old sisters who remain
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.

Every evening for years,
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.

Soon the house will be empty
as it has not been since 1915.
Then, how those echoes will whisper
like disappointed ghosts
through all the dusty, empty rooms.


A tale of two sisters, who lived for almost a century out Beaver Creek in Port Alberni. On evening drives, we would see them, standing by the gate watching us pass. Last time, there was only one sister standing at the gate. I can see her face now.

Friday, June 27, 2025

Flight Maps of Stardust Voyagers




From protozoa that crept out of the sea onto land, from ape to Cro-Magnon man to us, through millions of years of non-human development, to humankind's arrival, our story took millennia to develop. Only in the last one or two hundred years, with ferocious determination and greed, have we managed to do harm to every species on the planet. At the same time, our seeking souls, knowing we have lost our way, still look skyward, singing. We are a species that cannot live without hope.

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.

How can human hearts
that so long for peace on earth
bear to wage a war?

Posting an older haibun in a world that is farther from peace than it ever was, as we watch democracy sliding away week by week.