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

What Remains

 

What belongs to us?
Not the winter-wild waves,
roaring in to shore,
not the long sandy beach
stretching all before,
not the soaring eagles,
flying up so high,
drifting on the currents,
wind-surfing the sky.

 No guarantee, the days ahead,
in rain or golden sun,
nor our plans and all the chores,
begun and not yet done.

Not the gifts just opened,
not the shelves of books,
for one day I must leave behind
everything that I
once took.

Even this body
with its span
of increasingly finite days
will take its leave
on time,
not mine to question
Heaven's ways.

What remains:
this day, this hour,
the sky-show out my window,
walks on the beach,
gratitude in my heart,
a forest trail
to follow.

The lifetime of love
I gathered and gave,
the lost ones
whom
I could not save,
the memories
I hold most dear.
What stays is love;
love perseveres.

A Desperado's Lament

 

An inukshuk, in the form of a human,
used in the far north to indicate directions
for travellers.

I found myself in a deep muse,

accidentally building inukshuks

with empty toilet paper rolls.

Desperados will try anything

to ease our angst.

The excitable incoming tyrant

might want to reconsider his plan

to take over unwilling countries.

Why not just get his buddy

to buy the whole planet

so he can Rule It All?

Guess what? I am a news junkie

whose addiction is taking me down.

Is there rehab for that?

I am now sentimental about the days

when people marched for love and peace

and tried to change the world

with social justice for all,

when being kind was the norm.

The world has changed, all right.

It is in a pitiful state.
I don't sleep well.

My question: how - when those at the top

set such a bad example of human behaviour -

how will we ever change it back?

for Shay's Word List

My antidote, as always, was to go to the beach where the waves are huge, wild and roaring just before an expected storm. Two eagles circled overhead. My wild spirit responded with joy. We have to buckle up for 2025. Lots of restorative beach walks in store for me!

SONG FOR SOLSTICE

With all of the things you have learned

from your long journeying,

with all of your heartache

that taught you to love and to cry,

and with all of your dreaming

that helped you to live,

with that same loving heart and merry laugh

that has brought you to the ocean's shore,

come out at dusk and celebrate

the full cold moon

at the place where the tide

kisses the tombolo,

then runs away, laughing.

Yesterday morning's dawn

approached as pink and fresh

as a young maiden

singing the new day in.

Tonight shows itself

as a wise old woman with knowing smile,

tapping her cane and hobbling.

But she still remembers her dancing feet,

she remembers,

and, in her heart, she is still dancing

across the beloved landscape

with joy.

You grew your soul

all green with wilderness

and wild with wolf-breath,

in a forest of great and ancient tree beings

breathing peace.

You owe them your every breath,

each one their gift to us.

The journey has been astonishing, magical;

it has brought you here,

to the edge of the sea.

And now you are looking at

those far, snow-capped mountains.

The echo of the heron's call

and wild wolfsong at midnight

will keep you here a while.

The tree trunks you hug

breathe their smiles at you; they whisper,

"we waited for you, friend,

for all these many years."

The sea sings your soul-song,

the only song you ever knew.

It sang you out of the desert

and over the mountain pass

to the wild shores of Clayoquot Sound.

It has carried you so far,

and it is singing, still.

Come out at dusk to meet me

on the shortest day, in the place where

the tide kisses the tombolo,

then runs away, laughing.

Let earth and sky

inform your grateful heart

that, finally and forever,

you are Home.

I read this poem to a packed house at the Roy Vickers Art Gallery the other evening, all lit up for Christmas. Tofino really loves poetry! Wishing you all full moons, happy Solstice and lovely holidays, whatever tradition you honour.

For my prompt at What's Going On : An Open Link

Tofino Loves Poetry

 

Leah Morgan, beginning the evening
with her beautiful song

Me, reading my Song for Solstice

The beautiful Roy Vickers Gallery
is such a wonderful venue for our Christmas
poetry event. As always, we packed the house.
Tofino really loves poetry!

Last night, our Poet Laureate, Janice Lore, hosted an amazing evening of song, poetry and laughter. A highlight was a poem contributed to by nineteen villagers. Janice had called for submissions and the response was wonderful. Each of us read our stanzas in turn. I choked up reading mine, as a wave of grief rolled over me. I barely got the words out. The topic line was In your deepest November, and of course November was very deep and very dark for my family, with the loss of my grandson, now forever gone, forever missed.

In your deepest November,
you slipped away
like an elfin child;
too soon, your long goodbye.

People were kind about my being submerged. It would be impossible to read those words out loud without emotion. 

That was my final holiday event. Now I will happily stay in my hermitage until the New Year. Other than some beach walks to commune with the wild waves.

Happy holidays, friends!

The Tree of Forgetfulness

I would like to sit under
the Tree of Forgetfulness
for a time,
take a break from
All That I Know
of a world
that is turning so dark.

Sister Owl,
sing us your song of peace.
We will sit under
Grandmother Cedar
and listen with our hearts,
longing for a time
when the people
of the world
will have forgotten war,
and learned to live together
without suffering.

Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
we will let go of
all that is clouded,
and invite in
all the light beings,
the Shambhala warriors
who will usher in 
the thousand years of peace
we have been promised.

Perhaps the coming darkness
will hasten their arrival.
How long can Mother Earth 
bear the grief
of our divisiveness,
the suffering of millions
of  her human
and non-human creatures?

How much longer
can we bear it?

Please, Sister Owl,
sing us a healing song,
so we can continue
to believe
that peace is possible
among the human race.

for Sumana's prompt at What's Going On: Forgetfulness

Bereavement

 

When the raven landed, claws

skittering on the bending bough,

I asked her: sing me a blues song,

pluck some cool jazz on the
broken guitar strings

of my heart.

It's so cold this winter. The fresh grave

is bare and forlorn without the softening

cover of grass, and as fast as his mother

places plants and flowers on his grave,

they are stolen, day by day and
week by week.

How is it we have lost the "kind"

in humankind? All our puny sorrows*
- and the bereavements beyond measure -

were predicted by bad fairies at our birth,

but life was musical enough to dull

the memory for a time. 

One grows old

and steeped in loss, then we remember:

life brings us our beloveds, but

there always is a cost.

For Shay's Word List. 

The italicized words are taken from the book and film about suicide titled "All My Puny Sorrows," by Miriam Toews, a noted Canadian author.

November

 

In your deepest November,
you slipped away
like an elfin child,

too soon,
your long goodbye.

This is my stanza for a community poem, contributed to by 20 local poets (yes, 20 in a population of 2000 - we are a community of artists of all types) that will be read at our Poetry Night on December 19th in one of the local galleries. I love our December gatherings and will read two of my poems there.

Still processing the grief, which will be lifelong, as I so very well know.

If December Were Your Friend

 

If December were your friend,

it would give you a walk on the beach,

waves and sky turned pearly silver

by the sun.

All colours would be intensified -

winter hues, which you never see in summer

with its prosaic golden yellow,

blue-sky brightness.

If December were your friend,

you would choose something special to eat

at the grocery store - perhaps a treat you only buy

at Christmas. And you might smile, passing along

the holiday decorations aisle, to pick up

a green elf with a long beard and no eyes,

to take home and place under the tiny tree,

just because it is cute.

If December were your friend,

you would come home and make

a nice hot drink of something good,

turn on all the Christmas lights,

choose a holiday movie for the afternoon.

If December were your friend,

it would give you a day just this delightful.

In fact, it just did, and so I know

December is my friend.

My continuing effort to recognize the goodness in daily life, as counterpoint to the horrors on the news. Heard this quote in the film "All My Puny Sorrows" and thought it so apt for these times: 

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

Today's Sermon

Today's sermon is
choosing not to turn on the news,
to sit in front of the Christmas tree lights,
sipping a cup of oolong tea.

Today's sermon is
watching a heron settle herself
on the top of an ancient spruce,
fluffing her skirts and trying
not to topple.

Today's sermon is
grey clouds that might clear,
or might decide to pour the forest
a little pre-Christmas drink.

Today's sermon is
making the choice to bathe
in the beauty of Mother Earth,
raising my eyes - and my spirit -
above the wars, injustices,
toxic rhetoric, hatred and division
that is humanity committing
the opposite of peace.

 for Mary's prompt at What's Going On - Today's Sermon

Light, Coming Back

 

photo by Elisabeth Smith of Tofino

In the darkness,

watch for the light coming back.
It always does.

It might be December sunlight

shining silver on the drama of winter waves,

galloping in to shore like white-maned horses;

or, a cello concerto on an autumn afternoon,

in the hour that turns golden, then fades,

just before the lamps are lit.

We have been missing the small miracles,

so distracted by the outrages

that assault our ears and hearts.

Today, I watched happy dogs with loopy grins

cavort together on a beach

turned magical by the way the sun

painted sand and sea and sky

into a pearly beachscape,

restoring my heart and mind

with puppy pawprints 

of peace and joy.

for Shay's Word List

A Legend In His Own Mind

 No image, in deference to
our sensibilities.

If I numbered the problems

we face in this world
in a book, or a poem,

it would fill us with gloom,

and an enormous and hellish

sense of doom.

It would become

instantly legend.
Like a fat orange man

in a trance of self-love

(and "other"-hatred) whose sycophants
line up to kiss his ring

because he is - weirdly -

unfathomably - objectionably -
- incomprehensibly -

famous.

When you look in his followers' eyes

you can see they're in a trance,

hop to his little dance,

deep in their orange bro-mance.

The people took a turning.

Soon the best books will be burning.

Too late,  too late

to go back to the starting gate.

Where Shay's Word List took me. 

HOMECOMING

The film is grainy. It is Christmas, 1950, and, one by one, the beloved faces come out the door at 364 Christleton, my Grandma’s house. Smiling into the camera, our grandparents, beaming with their children around them, who have come from afar: my favourite uncle, his wife and daughter; my mom and dad; my mom’s younger sister, with her piquant smile, tip-toeing down the stairs. My younger uncle with his shock of wheat-coloured hair, and his wife, only she left alive, now as curled and frail as an autumn leaf. They were so beautiful, impossibly sophisticated, I thought then, with their then-considered-cool cigarettes, and their laughing chatter. My aunt would take out a cigarette and tap it on the package, my courtly uncle swooping across the room to gallantly light it. “Time to go, Mother Bear?” he’d ask, eyes smiling, as the evening lengthened, and she would smile back, theirs the love story that fed my dreams, until his eyes stopped smiling and held the look of one betrayed.

On our last Christmas with our mother, (though we didn’t know that then), we played this film of her glory years, and she cried and cried, for all those missing faces, all that was gone. And now I am older than she was then, and more faces are missing. But I remember, I remember, the small cottage on Christleton Avenue, when I was young, and all those shining, smiling, beautiful faces, coming out the door, one by one. All but my last frail aunt now gathered Home.

Aunts and uncles smile
Christmases of bygone years
Tears for dear ones gone


for my prompt at What's Going On - Homecoming