Author Archives: Wendy

To Roost

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firs

As the sun turns everything golden,
turkeys fly into the firs to roost,
full grown birds with their burden of feathers,
babies, compact and stubby
with necks like dinosaurs,
amazingly fly up, too.

They negotiate themselves
from branch to branch in the stand of trees,
gradually working their way higher
as more clamber in from the adjacent field —
much small peeping,
much loud fluttering —
not bedtime yet,
just time to be safe and high
for the large-family rituals of settling in
before the darkening sky.

©Wendy Mulhern
July 3, 2016

Early Fruits

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plums2

Smell it first.
The unmistakeable scent of plum
rises from its smooth surface.
Feel its taut firmness
against your lips

Suck as you bite —
the juicy sweetness
flows into your mouth,
followed immediately
by a complex tang from the skin

It’s only a few bites.
The pulp around the pit
is brightly sour.
The tang of the skin lasts longest,
curling toward the back of your tongue
long after the fruit is gone.

©Wendy Mulhern
July 1, 2016

Clean

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coming home

This is for you, for that time when
the mud seemed to
keep spreading all over you
the more you tried to get it off
(a hand unwittingly bestowing smudges
on your face, your hair, too, now enmired)

When all those hapless efforts to get clean
evidently just made you worse
(the weary resolutions you adopted, to get out
just sank you deeper)

And the rough voice said,
There is guilt, obviously —
there must be payment,
your redemption will, no doubt,
take a long time
(if, indeed, beneath the mud,
there’s anything left to redeem)

You cried, save, or I perish.
You washed yourself in tears,
you huddled, waited

And that, as always,
is when the lifting waters come,
bearing you up, separating
each strand of hair, floating
the dirt away, wrapping you
in weightless warmth

And tender hands
cradle you, bring you home,
saying, this is my precious child!
and everyone rejoices.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 30, 2016

Shared Vision

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floating forest

Like forms emerging from fog,
a feeling starts to separate
from the narratives,
a commonality
cognized with surprise,
self-fathoming through glimpses of another

Quick connecting of the dots
until the web’s expanse is stunning
and we feel ourselves
wondrously
held in something
whose omnipresence
renders dislocation impossible

We each came here alone,
yet, to arrive, we had to come together,
had to see each other, and how we all share
the vastness of this view,
how we have achieved
belonging through reverence.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 29, 2016

Shade Garden

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shade garden

Summer days,
and if you want a shade garden,
if you want refreshing honeysuckle breeze
to float through cedar,
if you want the cooling
of eighty years of standing
through moisture nurtured northwest nights,
come join us — you are welcome

If you want to be lifted
in the bright bubbling release
of knowing you are loved,
and that none of your halting efforts
and unfulfilled resolutions
make any difference —
nothing held over your head —
we are here to love you — you are welcome

And if you want to feel your roots
growing thick and strong
in the rich, dark humus of home,
curling like toes in cool, damp sand,
kissed by mycelium,
if you want to know your purpose
is established and entwined with many others,
come join us — you belong.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 28, 2016

Still Small Voice

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morning with old fence

I lay down to sweet sleep.
It surprised me, arrayed, as I was,
against the fierce and ragged monsters
of the night, prepared, as I wasn’t,
(despite my frenzied efforts)
to battle them to the death

I had resigned myself
to creeping failure,
to the dark and desolation
of the coldest hour.
Instead, I woke to morning peacefulness,
the early waking of birds
and the first, pre-color, entrance of the light

Still small voice, so clear, so clarifying,
saved me when I couldn’t save myself —
Bright light to everything,
even departing monsters,
showed me who and where and why I am,
And the sweet direction —
what I’d madly thrashed at in my waking hours —
remains, a shining beacon for my days.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 27, 2016

I Need Some Help

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grasses with vetch

Quick as the asking, help comes —
It comes in myriad little ways
like each plant’s response to spring,
to summer, tendrils and leaves reaching out,
such a multiplicity of enlargement
that my field is overcome with green

So many individual gleams
from one sun. Look up, they say,
that is not you, the one that sits in misery.
You are up here, in elemental joy,
pure purpose, and the naturalness
of things being what they are,
perfect in that incomparable
(and uncompared) unfoldment.

Look up. She is not here. She is risen.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 24, 2016

At Play

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grass and dock

We take turns, playing this game —
It’s called “I can’t hold myself up”
We fling ourselves to the center,
to the mercy of the circle,
to the ready arms
that join to catch us

It’s a good game. It helps us feel
the web of care that gives us all our power,
the substance of the arms
that never let us fall,
that hold us, even as we hold each other

When the long arced summer sun
finally recedes to twilight,
sky going blue to sunset to gray,
we’ll leave these grassy fields
and go home for supper
and the lights in which we are sustained.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 23, 2016

What Matters

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grass and sky

Life, as it turns out,
is the only thing that matters.
We found out later
that we had gone through years halted,
an arm, perhaps, behind our backs,
some other essential element
not fully activated

We watched our thoughts scrambling
to make it right for ourselves,
to justify our failures or to vindicate,
to seek a truer path
or to decide that it’s too late,
to let the whole conglomerated
thing we’ve called our lives
keep tumbling along its haphazard course
to whatever inevitable end
the fall line has in store.

But the only thing that matters is Life.
Life that chirps above the traffic’s roar,
that unfolds in holy intricacy
beneath the ground,
that blesses odd moments with swift streaks of delight,
that rests us gently on the pillow of dreams
and rises in us, a constant consciousness,
the tenderness that takes us by surprise,
the love that keeps us opening our eyes.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 23, 2016

Summer Again

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daisy and self-heal

So, summer comes —
sweet streaming freedom,
if only for a moment,
the body memory of that release
stretching far into adulthood
infusing the smell of privet
with aching undertones

There will be years for engineering lives,
which still take on a life of their own
and fly along between the lurches
where everything falls down. We pick it up,
we readjust the load.

It now has all those memories,
each long enough to get lost in,
packed in bundles like a year of papers
to take home
to pack in bins
for some later reckoning
while summer sings its magic
through our bones.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 20, 2016