This collection of 100 poems by Don Hynes resonate with the rhythms of crashing waves and towering forests from the heart of the Pacific Northwest. Hynes explores the rugged beauty of trees, rocks, and rolling waves through an intimately personal lens.
More than nature poetry, these are soul poems – borne of memory, heartache, and dream visions. They reach transcendentally across time and space to connect with the reader’s own experiences of change and self-discovery.
Poems that reach into lifetimes – past, present and those to be imagined, and in the tradition of America’s most enlightened poets such as Mary Oliver and William Stafford, speak in a quiet voice of your place on earth and the place you are preparing.
Along the cracked sidewalks and traffic choked streets, beneath the winter barren of leafless trees, I gather the litter of holiness, tossed aside and left for trash. With scraps of paper, messages forlorn and forgotten, I piece together a mandala, rose window of pilgrim light for the solstice dark cathedral.
Quiet as fallen leaves, I search the dawn for signs of belonging, signals of faith. Crows fill the rooftops, rain on wet streets, the droop of willow and grinding of trucks. Then I find you at rest in the holy, carried within me wherever I go. Doors unlock, windows open,
With darkness past its peak, sunlight charms the rain-soaked valley after weeks of clouded skies. Beneath the paved streets of departed forests, there is the pulse of new-earth heartbeat, waiting only for the signal to be born Reading
