Blank Tablet
The morning is white as if nothing were written on the tattered parchment, as if sky awaited new color, new clouds, new waves on the ocean, new trees to break open in shining green. All of it new, and you sitting here with me, what will we write on the blank tablet of the world? […]
Alone and Listening
This is my time, before the flood and rising water, before the wind and shaking trees, alone in the dark listening to the silence, gathering what I am into a bundle of prayer.
Easter
Cold and wet feel like home in the spring passage; clouds piling against the mountains, the quiet mauve of plum leaves, above the streets a gaudy pink. Why don’t I color like the cherry blossom? Does the earth bear a deeper joy even when suffering? The hard task is to lay open the heart like […]
How We Love
Your hand in the night before sleep, before waking, patting my hair so lightly, your fingers telling the story of how we love, the song we sing secure in silence.
Winter and Spring
Life Within Smoke from a chimney, the faint spread of light, cold hand of winter on bare trees, thorns exposed on the flowerless rose; life within an ember opening our eyes to see in darkness the shape of things to come. **** Spring Rain Trees pulse and wave, green flags fluttering; the gentle touch of […]
The Mission
Ireland, 1919 Shaking him from sleep they came in the night, rain falling off their wet clothes like the sky he’d soon be under. “We want you to go with old man Heaney to cut down young Martin. The Tans have hung him from a pole in Kilbeggan. His brothers can’t go, they’re already drinking […]
Drowning the Memory
What fool would listen to ghosts beside the river, the shades of ancient trees, of badger and wolf when proud buildings fill the waterfront, roads sleek and strong rise above the spring flood? Lost souls beneath the bridges hear these voices and the plaintive sound of creeks beneath the pavement. We climb in tubes of […]
What We Treasure
The world can crash on shore like a storm pushed tide, water roiled, full of silt and clawing voices from the wind fed water, then a mother and father lose their son and everything stops, grief stronger than the ocean pulling us into the deep, the old voice before pride calling us to remember our […]
Salt Sea Womb
The sea drums slowly upon the shore in a steady pulse thrown down on the resting beach, the sound lifted from the sand to the shale and green tree canopy spread over the narrow strip of mountain above water. The sea message sent to the center of the earth with a returning song of darkness […]
Burnt Pot
There is always time for generosity, a place for kindness. Each person has their story, the suffering and cruel alike in their humanness, their need to be understood. Heartbreak is common, being seen a balm. Take a steel pad to the burnt pot of the world and scrub the char until the metal shines. Below every […]
Mouth of the Earth
I am fallen from the highest branch through cold air and strong wind to soften and decay in the mouth of the earth, becoming food for darkness, green unto summer.
Their World
We’ll talk sometime but not now, not for a while, maybe in the next life or when the sun lights the river and rocks shine. Maybe when the earth gives back what we left when we thought we had so much, yet all we had was water in our hands and the smell of green […]
You’re Done
You put it down you let it go you walk away you’re over with that so over; you tear up the pictures throw out the clothes forget about this and especially that you clean the attic then the basement do a ritual lots of rituals, giving whatever back to whoever until it feels tired and […]
Under Street Lights
New York, 1948 Jupiter rules the night in the long parade of far off suns shining in the deep dark, the same winter sky my mother walked beneath, her feet in drifting snow, the quiet all around her down the steep hill to the subway el, walking toward my birth. She was dressed nicely as […]
Desert of the World
Before the river and long wind to the sea, the streams that funnel and drop from seeping springs and glacial ice, before the mystery of birth in the rock cave chasm, water wells in the great darkness. The vast primordial of sin unremembered, a wealth of forgiveness where the treasure of silence yields the gift […]