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.
Welcome darkness, fear and blight, welcome suffering, welcome night. Welcome the beautiful, desert and seas, welcome the mountains, welcome the trees. Welcome ignorance, violence and pain, welcome the homeless, welcome the rain. Welcome the thoughtful giver of gifts, welcome the lame, welcome the swift. Welcome the womb, the seed and
Dropping like rain, I fall into a new year of starless nights and wet gray dawns, when crows return to silent evergreens as I search and shovel to excavate joy. The earth opens, then down I tumble into a vault of spring seeds, perfect and unbroken. The goddess of night
Down I go the solstice ladder to the crib where phantoms dwell, wearing the cloth of my familiar they cut and tear, so heartless in the gloom. I can’t save them, no one can, but in the night work of suffering and separation, soulful needles pierce the lie, threads of
