Category: poetry

Breathing in the air,
sending it deep
down
into my lungs

I feel the crispness and aliveness
restored

Leaves crunching underneath my feet,
A reminder that all that rises
will fall

I watch the leaves dance golden against
the gray sky
Without contrast, we have
nothing

Beginning and ending are
meaningless words
for everything is a cycle beginning

again as soon as it has
ended

The breath enters my body
only to be
exhaled

The leaf falls from the tree
only to be
one with the earth again,
nourishing the tree from which it came

We are fools to fall prey to this notion
that we ever end

tiny skeletons

scattered across the beach and I
wonder
what stories this ocean has stopped,
what stories it holds,
remnants nothing more than
tiny skeletons
brittle bones

Did they wash up that way
or were they picked clean?

What skeletons hide away from sight
underneath the dark cover of the ocean
deep down on the sea floor?

Do their stories breathe anymore?

What of the skeletons we hide
underneath our delicate skin,
pulled taught around muscles and tendons,
organs meant to keep us living though
they sometimes make us feel like we are dying
on our way to becoming
tiny skeletons scattered on the shore

The moments are so fleeting
The ideas pass through and if you don’t grab them
they are gone

Floating away, laughing,

like a rising balloon string that is just out of reach and then –
gone

Life is so fleeting
The moments pass through and if you don’t enjoy them
they are forgotten

Floating away, lost in the depths of the mind,

like each breath and how even before you notice it is

–
forgotten

The flower is picked before it has time to fully blossom
The blade of grass is mowed before it reaches the sky
The life we each live is over before we have even begun

–
unfinished

From the first moments as fragile buds,
the leaves heard the whispered story
of the day
they would come

tumbling
tumbling
tumbling
down

to rest upon the ground, of which they knew nothing.

Some caught murmurs of adventure, of
the promise of a new life
amidst the grass, a different green from any they had ever known

Others detected a sense of the fear
of falling through the sky
only to turn brittle and brown

(from luscious green to vibrant reds and golds to disintegrating, how could it be?)

What they all knew
was the inevitability
of the tumble

What they were certain of
was the uncertainty
as to when, or how, or why

The leaves hung onto their branches,
waving in the wind,
taking in the magnificent sights from all around

And when they fell,
some went on to tell the acorns
of the promise that lived in the sky

We rarely get a choice as to what the bridge
in front of us will look like and
as soon as our eyes, our mind, see one thing,
it shapeshifts into another
always keeping us attentive or else we find
ourselves midway across and the bottom falls out
or the destination changes
and we find ourselves feeling inside out yet
still hiding the deepest parts of ourselves and it
does not make sense and it
does not have to and so we walk on,
we pay attention step by step by step until
we look up and realize
we got to the other side.

Maybe we were there all along.

The Fire of the Fury

Sounds of summer and yet here I sit on the cusp
of Solstice
and I claim it now.

I cannot go back and change what has been so I claim it
now.

I allow the fire of the darkness to consume
the anger, to alchemize it into something more.
The anger, the root of it, go nowhere – they are,
always, and never will not be and yet –

Ah, and yet, all the possiblity they make way for
because I cannot change and so long as I sit
and simmer in the anger of what was, I feel
something immovable and so,

I move, I move the anger into the flame, I let it
build, I allow. I sit with it until each cell of
my being is hot to the touch
white heat, the flame dancing, rising
until the flame is no longer a flame
the anger is no longer anger

It has become the Fire of Fury
and it rages in all the ways the anger,
heavy as stone, could not

The Fire of Fury dances, sways, transforms,
and on the other side of anger,
I find purpose
On the other side of that which I cannot change,
no matter how hard I will it away
I find purpose

10 Things

1. I see the tree sharing space with the sky and clouds in the arched half circle and I wonder,
why can’t we?

Why can’t we share space in the confines in space and in the vastness of –

The sky does not get angry with the clouds for blocking its blue and
the clouds do not get territorial when the bare winter branches intrude upon the view and
the tree does not get frustrated that the leaves have fallen hastily and still green and

How can we learn from them all?

2. The wind is inviting the tree to dance and the tree
is blessed by the invitation, bowing and reaching and stretching beyond – always beyond – what one (one what?) might think the proper confines of a tree are supposed to be

We confine things in such bullshit ways and I say I am done,
let’s strip the clothes off the bodies, the skin too, and let us tumble out together, organs in piles,
blood mixing

Is that what we need to do to understand we are all the same in the way that all trees are the same, they just want to dance in the wind

3. The symbols of practice and tradition hold the weight of death.
My ancestors hid ritual away in a vessel so they could practice without having their breath ripped out of their bodies.
They created games to keep their holy stories alive in secrecy. The breath ripped out
again, and this is why, this is why I will light the candles.
The religion so far from who I am, and yet,
the ancestral blood runs
through these veins. They are,
still who I
am

4. The light has changed –
the gray makes the colors pop and I see the trees, they are not bare but green,
golden at the tips.
And as the sky turns pink, the outline of the tree grows dark, and everything changes, even though it is the same sky, the same tree, the same window that draws my gaze.

5. The ticking clock marks the time I can’t get back and the speed at which life continues on, whether I feel stuck or fluid.
Whether the world has ripped me apart again today, yet
the clock, an outer symbol of my heart, still ticking away, ticking away, ticking away until, one day
it stops.

6. A teacher of mine spoke these words, “Labels obscure our seeing,” and it felt holy holy to me
it felt as if that sentence could heal the world if only, if only we could see,
if we could strip away the labels long enough to notice one another,
to be without needing to complicate that being

7. A brilliant dash of orange just appeared in the sky and I marvel at how quickly
everything
changes

8. The cat meows and tells me that her dinner is more important than the words spilling out of my fingers and I say,
wait, just a moment more,
just another thought,
the faucet running and I need to catch it before it spills and slips away,
let me finish feeding me and then I’ll tend to you

9. My heart sings when I think about how I spent my day,
most of it with a friend who I seem to lose time with
we gather for coffee, or breakfast, and suddenly hours are gone and we’re planning to change the world and
wondering how we hold onto hope when
everything
crumbles
and crumbles some more
we weave between rage and anguish and complete exhaustion and hope and silliness – I think
we hit all of those multiple times today,
don’t I hit all of those multiple times
per breath?

10. A final thought as I look up to see the orange gone. Gone.
How quickly something can be gone. A moment. A breath. A life.
And yet we keep on breathing, we keep on beating our hearts, we keep on finding ways to
be,
to be good to one another, to appear and slip our hand into another’s,
to say without words, I am here,
I will be here
I am not going anywhere, not today.

In the silence of the morning,
boxes block my seat to meditation and
instead of moving them, I write and I
wonder if Ganesh has placed the obstacles
before me to bring me to another place of
meditation, knowing my needs more clearly
than I do, knowing I can find my voice and my
path here on the page and just
moments before, the darkness was calling me to slumber,
trying to save me from possibility and responsibility, to
curl up inside myself and hide, at least for a little while longer.

But here I am, breathing in the morning with its slow growing
light and the hum of appliances, the ticking of a clock,
the movements of my cat beside me and the traffic down
below, where life is already happening for so many and I sit here,
trying to get my footing on the day, trying just to be and feeling
blocked by boxes
empty and easy to move, but instead I
sit here
and pray through my fingers

I sleep
I eat
I dream
I write
I wake
l breathe

If I breathe
In my sleep
Then I wake
Only to eat
And then write
So to dream

I can always dream
When I deeply breathe
And if I write
Then when I sleep
My words I eat
Full when I wake

If I choose to wake
And remember my own dreams
It is then I eat
All the thoughts I breathe
When I return to sleep
My dreams I will write

When my bones decide to write
I know I am fully awake
Though I still exist in sleep
In fluid time I will dream
As long as I can breathe
Ideas form for me to eat

Sometimes poems are all I can eat
Creating them through the words I write
They are all I need to breathe
And in the moment that I wake
I know words are more than dream
So it goes I never really sleep

If I breathe in order to re wake
Then I must eat in order to write
So I will dream to keep from sleep

Trust. Trust. Trust that what feels broken
still holds the scattered light

Trust. Trust. Trust in the darkness that the
unknown, the unseen, is forming

Trust. Trust. Trust that time is a construct we
have created to invite in suffering

Trust. Trust. Trust that all that exists is openness,
expansiveness

There once was a woman,
and I cried at her feet.
And she whispered trust.
I melted.

I became the holy rivers flowing out of me
I became the darkness and the light
I became the wild and the tame,
the known and the unseen
I became the construct and the pliable possibility

One day, perhaps, the word will become
etched forever upon my skin
No matter, for they have always been etched upon my soul