What has sounded

What has sounded

to others

like endless gripe and grating unfinished complaint,

a chosen rageful fixation,

certain Pathology…

has been body and mind finding its way

through toxic darkness.

Nature being destroyed by humans

in blind arrogance and greed,

consumption wired into how many “likes” and “followers”–

those empty signs of worth and feedings of narcissism–

in ever-widening circles,

in rapid speed, increasing.

How.

How does a body and mind adjust to such devastation?

To home being pillaged and raped?

To the Temple filling with piles of trash,

masses of people,

noise and excrement along every path?

There is no adaptation to that.

There is constant heartache

and anger.

With home now being just another thing for sale

and silence and solitude disappeared,

what illness have we invited through our collective front door

in exchange for one more meaningless photo

gone viral?

It’s time we spend time on the virus

we have ignored

for entertainment.

Perhaps for the first time.

She pours glitter out of the glass slipper.

Ridiculous thing, sweat filled, fragile and unyielding.

With a moment’s further pause..

She hucks it and its mate straight

into the Sea.

Maybe there, in salty, living brine

they can return silica to sand,

or, at minimum, make homes

for lonely crabs looking

to entertain the holy wisdom

within their ocean-loving neighbors.

Glass slippers be damned, She mutters,

and skips off between broken waves and flattened

wet shore

simply to find her own fleshy rhythm.

Perhaps for the first time.

Woman, shave your head

Got long hair?

Got any hair?

Woman, shave your head.

And collect the assumptions hoisted upon you,

the ones you weren’t quite certain,

but now you know,

have been dragging you down.

Belly scraping the road.

Woman, got long hair?

Shave your head, and learn how confused

perceptions and expectations of you

are.

Where you may have been pretty, attractive,

desired,

suddenly the sight of that is gone

and people, most people, don’t have a clue

how to respond, how to comprehend–

But you were pretty.

You were attractive.

You were desirable.

Watch them turn their eyes away, unable

to look at you.

Hear them,

hating what they see and can’t understand,

say, “You look so…different.”

The least offensive, yet unasked for, comment

they can make.

Woman, got long hair?

Shave your head,

and discover what assumptions shove you low, in place,

a shallow ditch where you have been put.

Some react in adoration,

others with titillation, however briefly,

or with shock envy disbelief disgust.

Woman,

if ever you didn’t fully get it,

not in the tautness of your sinews,

how the appearance of a woman is believed

to belong

to the public,

that it is open invitation to

critique judgement opinion desire and rejection,

stick a personal act of transformation,

like dynamite,

within social view.

Woman,

if you want to know not

what others want you to be

but the stuff you’re made of,

Go,

Shave your head.

Solstice

We’re stirring the cauldron

the thick and sticky

syrup and grit

the mud pulling at our heels

not the bright spring sprout

with nodule of dew

but the dark, obscured, unformed

and weighty partner

the feeding stew

of shit, and fears, unspoken grief

broken tears

and mothering blood

offering slow-cooked nourishment

to the sprouts

that invariably come

here, there, we know not where.

Winter time,

soul, hearth, slumber and pie time.

May we hold growing light

tenderly

with encouragement

of the winter to come.

Knots in the wood

The knots in the wood strong

hands might try

to force flat and out,

erase..

impossible.

The tree has earned those twists and kinks,

hardened, toughened grooves and bubbles,

bulged eyes skilled at a different sight.

Gentle the hand given access

to the yearning, sorrowed places-

they are not to be fixed.

Scars

Scars

attest to bridges crossed battling dragons,

to threatening rivers entered

that pushed at knees, sucked at ankles.

To deep mountaintop scree, ragged, sharp and steep where

falling

meant death and dismemberment.

We were there,

we know,

we learned.

Yours lay upon your body

differently

than mine;

equally, they shape us.

Scars pulse out of step with the rest.

Each must be attended to,

honored,

for what they give,

for what they gave up.

Sing to the waters

Where salt meets sweet,

I sing to the waters.

Where sand holds wave, pelicans slap

great wings,

and solitary duck pops up from below

in stilled bowl

waiting for winter,

I sing

and Wind joins in,

ruffles the surface, wavelets building

a pattern hypnotic and old as Earth.

Sing to the waters,

their reply waits for your greeting among reeds,

rushes, willows and stone.

Where are the Grandmothers?

Where are the Grandmothers?

With family torn, history unknown, stories never uttered,

lineage not spoken,

where are we?

We become dangling dolls, feet like bell clappers,

swaying this way and that with no ground

beneath us.

So utter.

Utter.

Utter your questions and longings to the Grandmothers,

the Grandfathers, the Sisters and Brothers who couldn’t grow up,

the sharers and protectors from the other side where

viewing carries a different, sideways, deeper,

beyond kind of knowing.

Stir the waters you can not see,

the current carrying you, and ask.

Ask.

Ask and the formations for you to hold and gaze at

reminding you of the support in the surround

can shape, at last, in the wet red clay

held by your praying hands-

Grandmothers, Come to me…

In the cross-hatch seat

In the cross-hatch seat of the chair

wooden, dusted in time and use,

a cat

curled

and sleeping.

Looking over at her, floor boards below and sun

reaching through a far window,

doubt can not waver the sweetness

of a morning with feline, coffee, a book

and silence rising from the woods outside.

Where lies

If a push,

somewhere a pull.

Where taken,

pray it has been given.

The Western sense of community..

in itself a paradox?

We’re part–everyone–of centuries of history

cycling, tumbling, molasses-thick onward

with nanosecond “advances.”

No mystery that you, and you, and I

can not seem to catch our breath.

Faster is not forward,

as bigger not better, nor more money success.

Where lies the soul stuff making life

Life?