Tag Archives: stories

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.

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Citizens of the World

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Divided only by stories and space,
Spread across oceans,
We burn to belong.

loyalty takes tributaries,
Flowing water known by many names
The direction, the destination the same,
We babble like brooks about the better ones, the one way.

Monuments to freedom tilt across borders,
Still we stand and throw obligations at each other
As if handling hot stones,
No one owning where they’ve come from.

As long as we are terrified of each other’s thoughts and hands,
We’ll search for differences to divide us.
But you are not separate, only, from a different tree,
And like a leaf, I have fallen with you.

Child, the way has not been clear,
But change aches to be made.
It whispers under every breath,
The first and the last, and those inbetween.

No wonder we hold and no wonder we long,
No wonder we gather our own,
To stall the hunger for each other.

Knotted together is the good for us,
And the good for the world.
Put your hand down. Covering your eyes is not allowed.
Neither is staring. All has its balance.

So much of our tapestry of meaning is at stake,
Its patterns woven along many dimentions,
You glimpse it just beyond these nested, sacred shelters
Where like so many birds, one day every soul will soar, fly free.

The Stories We Tell _ Inspired by Dr. Seuss’ “The Places You’ll Go”

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The stories we tell,
The things that we see,
That we think explain
How things came to be,

When we know quite well
They’re not what they seem.
But this point can wait,
We say, sensibly.

For what would we do
Without stories to tell
Of the sun and the moon
How the sky knows them well?

Or how me and you
Run and dance, hope and cry,
Did our hopes and fears
Put the sun in the sky?

Or do we know worlds
Upon worlds of great truth?
Can we see beyond words?
Exactly what can we do?

What claims that we’re claiming
Can claim to have proof?
Yes, how can we prove
The nature of truth?

You’re off on your way
To learn laws and the like
F equals m*a,
Don’t go faster than light.

The principles work,
Though the stories, they change;
The quarks are the quirks,
Quarks are quirky and strange.

And it doesn’t stop there–
No, the stories go farther,
Here chromosomes pair,
There cells become daughters.

They divide and divide—
Are you satisfied yet?
Your brain cells divide
So you won’t forget–

The stories we tell,
The things that we see,
That we think explain
How things came to be.

But, between you and me,
They’re just stories, that’s all
Just our way of saying
This world’s beautiful,

And acknowledging worlds
That our words can’t contain.
When our stories start shifting,
The world will remain.

And some other teller
Of stories will tell
A story of us,
And tell it quite well.

And their story just might
Be better than ours
At explaining the seasons,
Motions, and mountains,

Living, and dying,
This great world and lying
Outside it the universe,
Galaxies, stars,

And why we must tell
These stories with care
To the people we cherish,
Whose planet we share.