Tuesday, October 6, 2020

FOR ONE WHO IS EXHAUSTED, John O’Donohue

 
When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight.

The light in the mind becomes dim.

Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.


THE MAYO TAO - DEREK MAHON

 

I have abandoned the dream kitchens for a low fire

and a prescriptive literature of the spirit;
a storm snores on the desolate sea.
The nearest shop is four miles away –
when I walk there through the shambles
of the morning for tea and firelighters
the mountain paces me in a snow-lit silence.
My days are spent in conversation
with deer and blackbirds;
at night fox and badger gather at my door.
I have stood for hours
watching a salmon doze in the tea-gold dark,
for months listening to the sob story
of a stone in the road, the best,
most monotonous sob story I have ever heard.

I am an expert on frost crystals
and the silence of crickets, a confidant
of the stinking shore, the stars in the mud –
there is an immanence in these things
which drives me, despite my scepticism,
almost to the point of speech,
like the sunlight cleaving the lake mist at morning
or when tepid water
runs cold at last from the tap.

I have been working for years
on a four-line poem
about the life of a leaf;
I think it might come out right this winter.

Copyright: Derek Mahon, Selected Poems, Penguin, 2000.

Collected Poems, Gallery Press, 1999.

 

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Where is beauty? poem

WHERE IS BEAUTY?

in the eye
or somewhere inside
the body

HUMMING

on its wheel

BASK

in sunlight

Study the humility
of grass

the steadfast
trees

Hold on to this breath-thread

reins
to calm my 
Restless

HEART





A Poem for Mothering Ourselves


I'm preparing a class for next week on the topic of Mothering Ourselves. I want to incorporate some beautiful serene music about the feminine face of god, and a visualization,  imagining the Shekinah or female companion of God in spirit form wrapping her wings around me, or soothing my brow with the palm of her hand, or lying in the lap of Buddha....here is a poem to go with that self-compassion.


What If?
by Jena Strong.

What if you knew
that everything was going to be okay,
that something was in motion
beyond your field of vision,
beyond even the periphery
of your knowing?

What if you knew
that everything you want,
everything you’ve been seeking,
trying to figure out, missing,
is right here, already whole
in your hands, in your life?
What if taking in what is
could satisfy your longing?

What if you could rest your frantic, racing, busy mind
and rest your neglected, tired body,
put your head down in someone’s lap
to have your hair stroked,
like a cat, or a child?

What if you didn’t need to understand
how it works,
but could enjoy the magic
of how love shows itself
in the most unexpected, simplest of gestures?
What if everything is just it should be?

What if nothing had to be better,
bigger, different, or other?
What would you do then?
Who would you be?"




 (SoulCollage cards representing Rest, on top, and the Great Mother).

Jennifer/Musemother

Monday, January 6, 2014

It’s Dawning on Me


If we do everything else but that one thing, we will be lost. And if we do
nothing else but that one thing, we will have lived a glorious life. Rumi

In my solitary quest
for a silent Sunday morning
free of phones and idle chatter
and hungry for connection,
I watch the hazy sky at dawn.
Then seek the bronze/gold sun
of the inner sunrise,
under the rich cashmere shawl
of breath.

Where thoughts are thrown back
into the lake like fish
too small to keep.
I am after bigger fish,
the One Voice that purrs
and picks me up, kitten
in its mouth.

Held by the wide Mothercomfort,
awe in the face of such deep
nourishment, a seed
reawakens-- the passion
for living inside-out.





Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Women's Stories

















the ones we tell each other,
late at night or early in the morning
over coffee & a cigarette,
more than one if it's a story we've told
over and over like chain smoking, like
dirty laundry soaking in the tub, stains
evoking lost memories of teething, cut
lips, blood on the sweatshirt where
you held his head & he bled all over you
& you want to speak about this love
you have for other women who listen
intently, with their own pain showing
& many cigarettes to carry them
through the telling.

a compassionate voice or ear,
the closeness we feel yet cannot say
because we're afraid of a label
but what we really want, I want,
is someone fearless, a weaver of words
or truthteller, someone who's not afraid
of hurting while resetting a bone.

to talk about the helplessness of being
stuck in a house with a sick child,
the boredom that strikes,
the complaining we do, being called martyr
when all I really want is to tell someone
how unfair it is that I'm the only one
they call for in the middle of the night
& it's my ears hear them coughing
at 3 a.m. & I can't just lie there.

how to find out what our own needs are
& how to take care of ourselves,
not just wait for him to come home, take over,
pick up the toys and the pieces, mop up our spills,
how to find a quiet time, time alone,
time to think & write.
our need to be replenished with each other,
filling up our bowls with sugar & coffee
so we can tell our stories
not just talking over fences in the backyard
but actually getting out & seeing women
doing the same hard work,
no pay, no thanks, just their little faces
when one least expects it, smiling & asking
me to sing a song about I love you
 or making up a song about superman
all by himself in the living room.
he says, go away mom, don't talk (meaning
I have to do this alone, don't listen
cause it might not be perfect the first time).

I send you this in guise of a letter
because that's the way the words are falling out
of my fingers. in my mind I hear
the tapping on keys and it comforts me
at least I can listen to myself talk
without talking out loud (for that's
what crazy women do).

so I keep on writing & dreaming
trying to live truthfully
with my emotions, in my body
and I hope you do the same.

from Little Mother, Jennifer Boire
published 1997



Thursday, October 10, 2013

Autumn Poem by John Keats, 1819




TO AUTUMN.
                                            1.
    SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
    Conspiring with him how to load and bless
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
        And still more, later flowers for the bees,
        Until they think warm days will never cease,
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
                                            2.
    Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
        Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
    Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
        Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
    Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
        Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
            Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
    And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
        Steady thy laden head across a brook;
        Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
                                            3.
    Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.