Tag Archives: poem

I sing of an age

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I Sing of an age that’s almost flown
Birds whose voices raised the morning sky
Wild landscapes, spread out to receive the naked sun
Trees whose roots embraced the earth, yet towered high
Seeds that sprang up fragile life, silent but for the wind

I sing of the age of crumbling dust
Rumbling wheeled boxes that fume with piercing cries
Houses molded for masses, as if carved from a single stone
Plants with their exhalations of thick smoke, clouding corroded concrete fields

Forests that burn while communities fall
Beneath a cacophony of chorused lies
Millions enslaved to masters ticking on the wall
Hands that wring the time from unlived lives

Endless games of monopoly and musical coins
Galleries of staged photographs, manufactured mirrors to memory
Chiseled bodies, carved into perfection, whose occupants still seethe with self-loathing and hate
Gold palaces, beneath which bones rattle the dark restlessly

Stories of renewal on tips of tongues that never tasted rain
The deserts of souls whose blood runs dry
Endless grey complacency to numb the festering and open wounds
A harvest of pain sewn from all we deny

Wars waged to sunder, to ravish with rage
A wasteland of frightened faces fleeing for shelter, turned away
Nuclear families forced to split apart, fission into half-lives
Screams in school yards and the drip of silence cold as death

Generations gaunt and starving and those who crushed them to make their start
Spilled greed that leaves a spreading stain
A sea of fear to fill the ever-widening divide
ANONYMOUS sentries sent to defend and guard against each broken heart

Children who are taught to lose themselves before they’re formed
Men and women wanderers with vacant hollow eyes
Their tears from banished terrors fall stillborn
Life lingers, though breath’s motion fades as oceans rise

I sing of an age bereft and slowly breaking
Each, though aching, standing alone
Among the paths still left to us for taking
Could we accept and meet this age, and one another, as our own

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It Doesn’t Matter

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*********

So what if I have wasted my hours bogged
Down in a slough of brokenness,
Time oozing from fingers
Fumbling through the quagmire of yesterdays

So what if I have tried to be loved
By pretending perfection or by pleading,
screaming out the names of disowned silences
While they cringe in the corner, craving to be seen

So what if the path to the past
Is a constant erosion of storms
Each echo a lashing of lightning
Crackling and snapping the new dawning sky

So what if I feel flawed and fragile and have no children
So what if the stars still shine brighter than the smoldering spark inside
So what if I have most often chosen the false safety of shadows,
Fed by their frightening, familiar frenzy

It doesn’t matter how often my clay self quakes
As my conception of family crumbles
Shaken to its foundations
Along a fractured fault line

It doesn’t matter how many times I have curled like an infant
On the floor of my room, clothed only in sky
Trembling against the return of frozen fears
From the far reaches of the forgotten

For time after time,
You come to wrap me in a quilt of compassion,
And meet me with gentleness as an equal
With an acceptance that knows no language

Then I can sing melodies of my own making,
Though I’ve yet to learn all the words in the music
Then I can share my truth, woven tapestry of story,
Though sometimes I might only give birth to my longing

Again and again, I can reach out to you walking beside me
No matter what I’ve done or where I’ve been
Again and again, I can reclaim this strength, returned, as my own
No matter how many times I’ve given my power away

I can wake up in your arms, day after day
No matter how lost I feel in the depths of the dreaming,
And soothed by the steadying sound of my breathing, slowly,
Slowly, open my eyes

*********
Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter: not because life and its actions are meaningless, but because the kind of love that leaves you breathlessly in wonder, at peace and knowing your own wholeness knows no conditions or limits. I have to keep re-membering this the hard way. This week, when life spun out of hand and all I could do is let go and trust I would still be held, I also recalled this quote from Rumi which inspired this poem.

“Come, Come, Whoever You Are
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.”

Sadhbh Speaks

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Golden tresses spill, a cascade of sun-soaked tears,
And you await homecoming, forever at the threshold of the world.
In the song of silent empty hands, you grieve alone.

The waterfall roars your screams from world to world,
A thousand tumbled beads still rippling with the shimmers of last light’s touch,
Golden tresses spilling a cascade of sun-soaked tears.

I wept such tears once, as the eagle flew far beyond the sky,
Before shadows eclipsed an abandoned sun, or my screams died in singing silence.
If only I’d awaited homecoming, forever at the threshold of the world.

Dear hearth-daughter I never knew, we keen for our deer ones the same.
If you turned just once to look behind you, would you know me by my sad doe eyes?
Your family aches to fill your empty hands with love. There is no need to grieve alone.

***

Photo from Jane Dougherty’s now quite past poetry challenge from way back on the first of June. Check out her blog and all the entries which made it both on time and in the official round-up, Silent Cascade Poetry Entries. We were supposed to use the above poetry form and the words cascade, eagle, tresses, abandon, and rippling. This poem has been in my head in several different versions for the past two weeks but I have fallen seriously behind in all things blogospheric (yes, that’s a real word … starting now!) I’ll keep attempting to catch up again.

The Weary Ones

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We Trudge treacherous trails
Rough mountains and the thorny plains of tomorrow
We listen as landscapes keep up their crying
Memorizing wounds and their places

Hot sun rises, leaving burned faces
Here, human hatred, there is no shade
We taste the tears of the left behind
Wander the day, sharp with remembering

Never stop building
The changes we wish for our children
Never stop moving
Toward something, anything good

Again and again feet step around boulders
Hearts heavy with sorrow
We are holding onto the edges of hope
Often simply for balance

The vision blurs
The directions weave in front of drooping eyes
We fall, but do not lie down
We stand, but are never still

Only the steps, one, and the next
Out into a sharp and staggering world
Stumble through actions
Hope the helpful ones take hold

Whatever end you are seeking
You might reach it on the well worn way
Or arrive bedraggled and bruised
Emerging from the path you forged as your own

No time for the tears behind your eyes
No time to fan the flame of anger
Now, and now, but the future is a needy child
It hollers and hungers, feed it all that you have

The Spiral Pattern of Living

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There is no finish line
No tick marks or check boxes
No blanks to fill in
No thing to cross out

Instead we walk the labyrinth of living
Inward and outward
Weaving ourselves into being
Learning our mystery moment by moment

This terrain of trouble and triumph
I have traveled many times before
Wondering what it was I did wrong
If I was growing, why had I returned

The contours of the path remain the same
Not so, the one who passes through
Every switchback, rewandered turn, has mattered
And in the crossing and recrossing, we unfold

I will come by here again, hold out my hand
To welcome every seed of joy
And the beauty of the broken roots
With stark scars of sadness, red as sunset

Each time, a different phase of moon
Cascades its own collage of color
Each time, reflected light casts its shadows
And I am left breathless once again with the remembering

Fly Anyway

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A work in progress
A million shards of mirror –

It could take lifetimes,
Making peace with the pieces

Now, where does that leave me?
Which present do I share –

When I still have thoughts that shouldn’t be there
Patterns I should not repeat?

Fragmented, fractured – who am I to speak
Of wholeness, so fragile

With little sense of direction,
A broken wing –

The wild winds whisper,
Fly anyway.

You Came _ In Memory of Carson

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You came into a world, crying out the joyous wonder
Bursting to begin, to set the spark of life aflame
Safe within the arms of love, they brought you home

You came to be a living song, long into the years of growing
Knowing within every passing moment
All that precious time could name

You came and went so quickly
Your laughter a dying memory
Your love, a glowing ember, still remains

You came into a world in peaceful silence
Across the threshold, a light, a hand to welcome you
Safe within the arms of love, they brought you home

The Great Day Will Soon Arrive!

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It’s happening, everyone! Tomorrow I will be on a plane to Anonymous Desert and will be defending my dissertation this Friday. Basically I will be spending 2.5 hours in a room with four committee members who will ask me all sorts of questions, and then decide, based on my responses as well as the over 200 page document I’ve handed in, whether I qualify to graduate with a PH.D. It’s been an incredible amount of work and I am still preparing! This is why I haven’t written much new content on the blog. To say it’s been all-consuming for a while now is an understatement. 🙂

My goal is to be Dr. Éilis on my return.
Meanwhile, I leave you with the poem that first began this blog back on December 3, 2013.

Being Complete

There is not one word to name
Shallow tidepools
Or rocky crags,
Wind blustering by

Or blue, deep flowing,
Growing blue
A whirrlpool of color
In the vastness of this sky

There my self of many faces passes by
The red beneath blood deep within
And blue around me reaches
Out across the thresholds of my skin

There but for her shaping hands go I
Molding new ground for my wearry feet
There but for their ancient eyes
And strong, tall forms,

Long streaming hair,
Glinting shields
And for me finding all of me,
I might never have been whole

I duck inside
The shelter of my own light house
As vast as sunrise,
As wide as mountains

As old as time
Home at last
I sweep the floor
I’ve left my golden shiny things outside

The only thing that matters now:
Unconditioned joy of living
Poured out from their hands
I once asked why,

Fragmented my soul
Against stone to understand
But now newly formed and unknowing
I am content to stand,

Belonging to myself
Beside them hand and hand.
Where haunting melodies of Lír’s children linger in the silence of the night
Where the Fianna’s hunting horn lies buried,

Where I can still follow the footsteps
That lead inside earthy knolls
Where landscapes reawaken
The absences of dreams leave holes

Along the path less taken
I discovered who I was
Fragile and bony, easily torn
Eternal and holy a spirit now born

When the rains came and washed fear away
Into the seven seas
I opened my eyes from a long sleep
Of seven years

And with a gratitude more full
Than the universe has stars
I jumped off securities jagged ledge
And soared into the trees.

Now I do not try
To name what refuses to be a certainty
Better it remain wild and unruly,
In the history of landscape

Better to welcome those you dance with wordlessly
So you do not waltz
Into the four sided space
Of a definition

With no way to return
As inexplicably
As you have come
Slide me into the glaring light

Of your microscopic gaze
Try to holler at the silence
Murmuring along
Edges of my life

I will sift like mist between
Your fingers and nothing will linger
But the emptiness you made of me
For I am, at heart, a mystery

With no word to capture the unfathomable totality
Who I am
When all is said and done, even then,
I will be.

Further Transitions _ A Villanelle

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I grieve, though I’ve never lost what’s mine,
Struggling to accept what I wish wasn’t true.
I long to let go, still afraid of what I’ll find.

Too many people choose smallness, forgetting how to shine,
So while I’m in this world, I feel most at home with you
And I grieve, though I’ve never lost what’s mine.

Why embrace life’s sorrows and joys, equally in kind?
Getting hurt has only made me more mistrustful of the ones I knew.
How can I let go when I’m afraid of what I’ll find?

Hush, you say, you defend against illusions when you’re fine.
But, I’m trying to hold back waves of tears from overwhelming me anew
With grief, for I’m sure I’ve lost what’s mine.

Perfect as I am? The idea blows my mind.
What about all the wrong turns and mistakes I should work through?
I long to let go, still afraid of what I’ll find.

If I leap ahead, cross beyond the line,
Where will I land, strangely beautiful and new?
I’ll surely grieve, though I’ve never lost what’s mine.

The loss is of all I need to leave behind,
Even if its time and purpose long since flew.
I long to let go, still afraid of what I’ll find.

Uncertain change initiates its eerie whine
At the standstill. I remain, not sure just what I’ll do.
I grieve, though I’ve never lost what’s mine.

Knotted threads of broken patterns continue to unwind
And the nets that kept a sense of safety number few.
I long to let go, still afraid of what I’ll find.

I don’t know where I belong, both embodied and divine.
Bridged in between, I wander, a missing shade of blue
And grieve, though I’ve never lost what’s mine,
Longing to let go, still afraid of what I’ll find.