You tried our patience.
You scared us to death.
During a global pandemic,
you sent heat domes, wildfires
tornadoes, hurricanes and floods.
We lost forests, highways,
crops, homes, whole towns.
Some people and so many animals died.
There are not enough tears
in the world for all of our pain.
And yet.....
this earth is so beautiful.
It takes my breath away.
As we see the new year in,
we are hopeful, happy,
ready to do it all
again.
Shared with earthweal's open link.
Beneath the epidermis, top-left quadrant,
I feel the pinch: where memory resides,
three-quarters (or five-sixths?) of a lifetime long.
How many years are left, to gaze on loveliness,
consort with dogs, pen my rhymes?
We always want more, when this moment
- now - so richly layered, is perfect
and Enough.
We let so much slip by, may only realize
how glorious it all is when mobility is gone,
and we're viewing life through a single window pane,
when our bed has become a portal
for our dreams. In our darkest midnights, still,
sometimes we fly.
My bones are bending to the earth
like a witching wand, a tuning fork,
attuning themselves to Mother Earth's low hum.
In those profligate years, we thought time endless,
spent it gloriously, foolishly,
those days when we felt forever young.
Now memory sings, now pinches,
Time woven through with snippets of wonder:
sea-fog wisping across small islands,
smell of sea salt and clumps of kelp,
a raven's throaty croak, an eagle's dive.
Such gratitude
that I am still
alive.
Things under the sky in the human world
may be going awry, but a glorious red sunrise
spread across the heavens
behind the barn this morning.
I opened my eyes on wonder.
The clouds are heavy with predicted snow,
so we throw another log on the fire,
make another cup of tea
and count our blessings:
tall pines with woodpecker,
two bunnies chasing each other
across the yard, hills gleaming blue-white
through the kitchen window,
two soft-nosed horses in the pasture,
the dog playing with her new Christmas squeaky,
warmth and food and long slow yuletide days.
Soon I will head home through the mountains
to the sea, to catch my breath once more
in unceasing wonderment at waves and sky,
forest and ever-changing tides.
Beauty abounds.
Every day, in every way,
it is all around.
For earthweal, where Brendan asks where we find peace and beauty. When we find it everywhere, we are fortunate indeed.
Already, tomorrow is Christmas eve.
Yesterday, the grey sky barely lifted.
It grew dark at four o'clock.
We drove through the mountains in the rain,
into the misty valley,
Christmas lights winking in the gloom.
Even the horses were sheltering in their stalls,
but the juncos and hummingbirds were
as hungry as ever at the feeders,
enjoying their pre-Christmas meal.
We leave the tree lights on all day
to cheer us, remembering other years
when the whole family gathered,
noisy and laughing.
So much has happened since.
One year, happy with your gifts,
you said "I'm so happy, I'm sad."
You were always making us laugh.
Now you sit in a wheelchair
in a nursing home,
half of your body not working.
Sometimes, now, I make you laugh,
a startled laugh that lifts my heart,
because if we didnt laugh, we'd cry.
Somehow life goes on
through all the highs and lows.
Somehow, this strangest of Christmases,
like all the others,
will come and then will go.
For my son Jeff, only 50 years old, who suffered a stroke last summer. It is good we can't see ahead to what can befall us in our lifetime.
Through the mountains,
cedar and spruce
are blanketed in deep snow,
like tall Christmas angels
clothed in white.
It is another Christmas,
my brother-in-law's black truck
making its faithful passage
between my home and the farm,
where a bright-eyed dog
and two whuffing horses
with soft noses await
my arrival.
There will be a fire
in the fireplace,
a real Christmas tree in
the new big window,
and the house's new footprint
lying over the house our mother
once lived in. I wander the house,
noting the changes with delight,
small dog at my heels hoping
for treats.
So many years have passed
since we first walked the original rooms
with our mother. How she loved
her first years there, baking bread,
feeding chickens, before her health
suddenly declined and she left us
way too soon.
All beauty will be lost
but even loss can be beautiful,
the poet said. And there is such beauty
in remebering all the lost loves,
the revered humans, the
loving-eyed animals who blessed
our lives, beauty in
the layers of memories
blanketing them, the way deep snow
wraps the winter trees
in shimmering radiance.
Inspired by "Upon Discovering My Entire Solution to the Attainment of Immortality Erased from the Blackboard Except for the Word 'Save" by Dobby Gibson. Italicized lines are hers.
for earthweal: SOLSTICE (Nadirs and Zeniths)
Inspired by Reverence by Marianne Kunkel
Well, these were a bit of fun. The last image might have something more to say, we'll see. For Shay at The Sunday Muse, with thanks for all the cool prompts.
Inspired by Shavasana by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Shavasana is the corpse pose in yoga.
My neighbour's wolf dog, Kodiak, whom I love very much, nearly died last weekend from ingesting something toxic. He is only now returning to himself, which is a huge relief.
Sharing with earthweal's open link
Oh, yes. It did.
for Truedessa, dreamer of dreams
What does the silence say,
in the early morning, just before dawn,
Christmas lights winking in the window,
and in the tall tree across the street?
What is it saying before you turn on the news
and are bombarded with tornadoes, hurricanes,
the rebuilding of roads and towns after flood?
Does it sit in your heart like a small canary,
trying to convince we miners that our world
is still safe? These past months have taught us,
if nothing else, that at any instant, the ground can
sweep us away to another place
where we own only the clothes on our backs.
We have entered the country of no control,
our roads and bridges and buildings flattened.
We climb out of our shattered houses
in shock. Crisis does not honour borders;
we are more vulnerable than we ever knew.
We are like all the other global climate refugees, now.
Once again, it is Christmas, once a time of excess,
in those old ignorant days when we thought
we could purchase some happiness for others.
Now one looks at each item, calculating:
how much wrap, how much plastic,
how much waste - more Things
we don't need. Our gifts grow small and useful,
or not at all. So sad that, after gathering things
all one's life, then downsizing, once, twice, three times,
and giving it all away: what a lot of energy
was spent in the gathering and the letting go.
The silence lives in me; I become the Observer,
a Listener to what it has to teach me,
watching the day unfold with whatever it brings:
sometimes a skiff of snow along the beach,
sometimes the breathtaking morning sky,
sometimes feathered beings, with wings.
Inspired by What the Silence Said by Marie Howe.
at earthweal we are contemplating advent poems for earth.
Kodiak is my neighbour's dog. He has had a hard life, has canine PTSD, but also the most joyous, loving heart, which I have watched blossom the year I've lived here, because I love him and he loves me. In a perfect world, he would be mine. But we all know this is not a perfect world. He comes to my door for a treat every morning. I ruffle his fur and tell him what a good boy he is. As his owner leads him away, he looks back over his shoulder at me. It kills me, every time. Yesterday, he got into the neighbour's garbage: chicken bones, some clothlike material and, somehow, maybe off the counter, an ounce of pot. He was comatose all day, thankfully indoors, and not out in the snow. The vet came again, at 5 p.m., to give him an I.V. By tomorrow, he hopefully will be more recovered. But watching him crumple onto the ground is an image seared into my head. One more wolf, who loves me, and whom I cannot save.
Let me write you a praise poem
about how, yesterday, Wah'nah'juss
was dusted with snow,
a sprinkling of talcum powder
along her womanly shoulders;
how I caught my breath in wonder.
Let me tell you about wonder,
how it has carried me through my life,
made me a blue sky lover,
a communer with ancient trees,
has propelled me along the wildest
shores, exulting. Let me tell you
how the wild world sings to me,
how I sing back in praise
of her never-ending beauty.
I have not words enough to paint you
the way the mist drifts and changes
on hillside slopes; how the clouds
form along the ocean's horizon,
turning colours at dawn
and eventide - how this feels
in my heart, as I look upon
this beloved landscape with joy.
Let me tell you about joy.
It is a wild wolf puppy gamboling
along the beach, chasing a leaf.
It is a walk along the cliffs, when the waves
are huge and crashing over black rocks
to our awe-struck "Wow!"
It is returning home after too many years away,
a heart forever-after grateful to open my eyes
each morning and find myself still here
in the land of my dreams.
Let me tell you about dreams - how they led me
out of the desert and through the mountain pass
to the home of my spirit. How, not once, but twice,
the door to Clayoquot Sound opened and
invited me in. How
grateful, grateful, grateful, I.
Let me speak of gratitude, how it fills my heart,
how I whisper "thank you!" so many times a day:
thank you to the trees, to the ocean's roar,
to the sweet harbour, the hills,
the village dogs with their loopy grins.
"Thank you, Tofino,
for welcoming me in."
Inspired by Ellen Bass who writes what she calls "praise poems." There is so much to praise in my life here.
Sharing at earthweal's open link.
for earthweal where the challenge is: The Journey
One April years ago I wrote a series of Traveler poems. I didnt so much write them as take dictation. The words just came. I havent written a Traveler poem in some time, so I started tapping at the keys this morning and this is what came out. The closing lines surprised me a little. Smiles.
It is a misty first of December. The storm
has stopped, for now, and we catch our breath.
I gobble at a raven perched on a stop sign.
Where did she huddle, when the heavens opened?
Grey sky hanging low, grey harbour,
villagers all in rain gear, smiling hardily.
"Crazy weather!" we agree. "But nice today!"
At the clinic, a white woolly dog
who knows me as the Treat Lady,
gives a sharp bark from behind the counter.
When I go into the office, he follows me
and refuses to leave till he gets his treat.
Village dogs make my day.
Back home, in my cozy rooms,
with my Christmas lights on,
I allow myself to settle in
to bad-weather lethargy,
though there is so much
I could or should be doing.
How long do any of us really have?
the poet asked, so I allow myself
one more day of enjoying being alive,
in my cute little place, among my wolves
and books and movies - one more day
of Being. The Doing will have to wait.
Inspired by Self-Compassion by James Crews at Wild Writing.
In memory, I return to the bare brown hills
of my childhood summers,
that turned blue in winter snows.
Again and again, my heart goes back
to the little cottage on Christleton Street,
to the glamorous aunts and uncles
coming smiling out onto the porch in the video
now gone grainy after so many decades.
Sometimes now, on early summer mornings
at the farm, I smell lake-scent, bullrushes,
weeping willow and Ponderosa pine, and
I am back again, eleven years old,
freckle-faced, hair in a pony tail,
in pedal pushers and t-shirt,
biking the hot and dusty streets.
"There are landscapes one has lost":
1260 Ethel, when my children were
young, leggy and laughing, before life
brought us all so many tears.
My trailer in Tofino, the realization
of my dream, eagles wind-surfing overhead,
sunrise a fiery orange over the inlet,
joy and contentment at finding home
in the place of my dreams.
My last little home, a smaller trailer
in the country, where Pup reigned supreme,
his elderly paws padding beside me
in the darkness before dawn, returning
to our little home warm with golden light,
my heart brimming with gratitude
for the peacefulness
of that little home we'd made.
There is no going back. There is only
remembering: I recall the pain of loss,
the longing, when I left this beloved landscape
for the valley. Seventeen years of yearning,
before my joyous return.
One can never own a place. One can
only love it, and protect it, immerse oneself
in the beloved landscape with joy.
Remembering the past yet
fully present in the Now,
our hearts are large enough to carry
the full mix of memory and loss,
sorrow and gratitude that fills us
when, in memory, we return
to all the places we have loved,
that made us who we are.
Inspired by Places To Return by Dana Gioia at Wild Writing. The italicized line is hers.
inspired by I Write Because by Anne Marsland of Wild Writing.
