In My Deepest January

 

by Bryony Bensly

In my deepest January,

I placed my feet carefully

on the forest path,

to protect my well-being

as the craziness swirled

around us.

I sat on a rock wall

and watched the waves

rolling in, rolling in,

reminding me that

some things are eternal.

In my deepest January,

I tried to learn how to live

without you. It feels

impossible.

I need to learn
how to hold on to balance,

while witnessing things

I never dreamed I would see

on my TV screen,

knowing that only the trees,

the ocean, and the wild ones

can protect my peacefulness.

In my deepest January, I turn

even more devotedly, gratefully,

vulnerably, to the wild.

Strange to call it wild,

when humans are the ones

who pose the danger.

For my prompt at What's Going On - In Your/My Deepest January

Kindred

source

 

With my kindred,
I entered the church,
my forehead blessed
with a circle of ash.

ashes to ashes,
dust to dust

I've been told a woman
is made from the elm tree,
a man from the ash.

A horse
is only as free
as his guardian
allows him to be.

We live in a world of fences
and walls. Perhaps
this is the source
of all rage.

I took a trip
on my keyboard
to a place where
hundreds of shorebirds
lift together, as one,
into the sky,
then vanish.

My kindred now are scattered,
like hungry ghosts,
who have the knack
of visiting me
in dreams.
I wake up, dizzy,
and full of tears.

This is where Shay's Word List took me this morning. Strange.

The Time of the Hunger Moon

Note: It is crazy for people to get that close to wildlife. A moose will charge when it feels threatened, and the results can be fatal. Wild ones already feel threatened when they find themselves in places where humans live. We have to give them tons of room to retreat.

 

When the cold wind blows from the snowy peaks

across the harbour, and we pull our coats

around us, exchanging frigid smiles,

this is the time the bears, the cougars,

the wolves, are waking up hungry.

Sitting in their hot tub, my friends became aware

of glowing eyes, not two feet away. Cougar.

Two more walked up Lone Cone the other day,

after a stroll through town.
Cougar tracks in my back yard
one morning, hungry critters
on the prowl.

The wolves are wary, elusive,
on the fringes of our lives,

tummies rumbling - less habitat, less food,

they find living harder these days, just as we do.

The bears must still be dozing. So far,

in the woods behind me, we haven't seen

our resident bear that last year thumped our garbage bins

in frustration, smelling salmon scraps inside.

Such a hungry world,with billions 

of empty stomachs
and struggling creatures.

This morning, a crow came close as I loaded

my groceries into the car. Hungry crow,

what can I offer you? I tossed him a soft dog treat,

and three other crows landed, squawking - I had to toss 

one to each, to make it fair, before I drove away.

This is the season of the Hunger Moon,

and no one feels it like the wild ones,

who go in search of food and find themselves

bewildered, on city streets, in small towns 

full of people, a gigantic elk, with huge antlers,

making his way across four lanes of traffic,

no other way to get to the other side.

Thankfully he made it across, drivers

deferring to his right of way.

The season of the Hunger Moon

returns every year, for millennia

all creatures waiting for the spring,

when Mother Earth feeds her earthlings

once again.

I take my message from the wild ones:
hold on.
Hold on.

for Susan's prompt: What Cold Is. 

Where I live, by the ocean, the winters are very mild. We haven't had any snow this year (so far) and only a couple of storms. Some early blooms are popping up already. But the critters are as hungry as ever at the end of our very short winter. I am told the two cougar who wandered around town for a few days got away safely and SWAM to nearby islands. I didn't know cougar could swim!!

Cold

(No photo, in deference
to our sensibilities.)

Cold
like the eyes
of the MAGA group,
who seem like another kind
of person

Cold
like the hearts
of the mega-rich
who care nothing for
the struggles
of the
rest of us

Cold
like the stare
of the Angry King,
who, with all his wealth,
and unlimited power,
is still not happy

because there isn't enough
money in the world
to fill that cold, empty ache
in his chest

and cold's opposite:
Warm
like our hearts
that care for
the suffering planet
and her people,
like our hands
reaching out
to help another,
like our kindness
which no amount 
of toxic rhetoric
will ever douse.

Warm
like love,
like compassion,
that the oligarchs
deride
because they host
a desert within
where altruism
should reside.

I am struck by the hard cold eyes of the Mad King and his entourage of oligarchs, who may think they are happy with unlimited money and power, but who sure don't look or sound happy. We have to protect our peace, gratitude and joy, and tune in to a different frequency than the one they broadcast on, and I mean this both literally and figuratively.

 

The God of Everything

 No photo, in deference
to our sensibilities.

The ashes of democracy

taste bitter in the mouth,

voices sickened, sorrowing,
filled with gloom,
and the certain feeling

of being doomed

to live a reality we never

thought we'd see, and yet

here we are, and it has

come to be.

The hard-eyed faces, mostly white,

the fists raised in salutes

to the angry king,
his eyes hardest of all,

as he reveals his terrible plan,

spouting his obsessed untruths,
to rule like a tyrant
because now he can.

And even drunk
with all his power,
the Angry King
in his brightest hour,
is still not happy,
still is mad,
at all he feels
he should have had.

Where is outrage? where dissent?

They bow and smile to the terrible king,

that they've made god of Everything.

Hoping they'll be spared the lash,

they bend, servile, to kiss his ring.

Sigh. For Shay's Word List

Fourteen Years Gone - in Honour of Pup

Pup ~ March, 1997 - January 15, 2011

 

I feel it coming, this poem I will birth

on the fourteenth 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.