Author Archives: Wendy

Summons

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My touch reached you
Between worlds, you told me —
You felt me there as soft cirrus
Searching wisps that drifted
Through the doors of consciousness
Changing as they went
My fingers were, perhaps, songs
Planes of my skin
A blend of shifting colors
Pulsing through your light, transcendent form
I, awake in this world
Waited solid
My slow stroke 
Inviting your return.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 13, 2012


The family of plants

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I’m not so far
From the family of plants 
I know about roots and shoots—
The steady subterranean seeking for sustenance
Something to hold onto
Something to stretch into
Branching out pathways of deft exploration
Anchoring me in my knowing . . .

Intrepid shoots pushing out against gravity
Greening out leafily into the light
Finding my being by how I am growing
Moving in dazed phototropic delight
Life has its signature
Written in each of us
Everything living can read it
Everything living has tendrils that reach us
Everything living is needed.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 12, 2012



All I want

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(background music Isaac Shepard “All Smiles”)



All I want
is everything —
It’s not too much to ask
All I want is oneness
To soar in tune
in the surging seething symphony
of being
To be the roaring pounding flow
of all things living
To have my own song
constantly meet its harmony
My rhythm locked ecstatically
in polyrhythmic counterpoint
My down-bounce catapulting
someone else’s flight
All I want
in this moment
is the bright contact
that multiplies light
That pulses back the richest chord
and wraps us
in its sacred ring of sound.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 11, 2012



Cats’ Eyes

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I, too, have been entranced
by cats’ eyes
Limpid pools compelling entrance
Slow blink confirming contact
Sharing the acknowledgement of secrets
Ancient as the lore of cats
Silent as unfathomed depth
Hinted by the stillness
Or the slow wave of a tail

The cat’s eyes told me:
We, too
can fall totally
unhesitating, unrestrained
In spite of all our surface cat constraints
Into the wide secret
of love.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 10, 2012



Being One

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Together we are

so much older
than how we think of you and I
It’s said our DNA is from the stuff of stars
concocted in their furnace
in the ancient skies

The blood we share
knows that it’s one ocean
It doesn’t feel the boundaries between
It pulses through us in a steady motion
Reveals that we are what we’ve always been

Though atomized for now
we are one body
We long for nothing more than going home
to where we feel the fall of every heartbeat
Each keeping our own rhythm
though we breathe as one
To move as one fulfills us primally
Our wave reverberating to eternity.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 9, 2012


(background music: Max Richter “Interior Horses”)



Tea in Wales

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Because of gratitude—
Its calmness and the way it spread
soft smoothing over edges of my day
I’ve just remembered tea in Wales

In autumn marked by bright and dark
of thundershowers and rainbows
Expansive hills and warm close rooms
to shelter us from cold

And tea with milk that must be cream
because its butter kissed my lips
while its soft steam
enhanced the coziness
of that sweet scene

So now
Like shared discovery of magic places
A buttery warmth spreads over me
and leaves its traces
Here where I need this peace
and these bright graces
to meet the challenges
the day occasions
How bountiful this gratitude
That now avails me
of the memory
of tea in Wales.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 8, 2012



Moon Lullaby

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Lay my head on moon-touched clouds
Suffuse my sleep with moonbeams
Let their coolness flow along my breath
Their sweetness reaching deep into my dreams
So permeating, let its light refresh
with gentle steadfastness
my halting meditation
Bring to me the comprehensive rest
that stills my heart’s incessant perturbations
Hold me in your light
till morning’s wings arise
to bear me into day’s resplendent skies.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 7, 2012

(background music: Isaac Shepard, “Foolish Youth”)


Celestial Bodies

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In the wide domain of space
ungoverned by an overarching gravity
You fly along a path perhaps not knowing
what force has launched you,
where you may be going
what bodies you may meet
and what attraction
may draw you into one another’s orbit

Once there, you may not know what gesture
might pull the circle closer,
spin you tighter, faster
Or which off-handed move
may loose the orbit
and send you drifting off
on pathways fast diverging

Where you may wonder afterwards
what it was you did
or who it was — if it was even you
or if you had a choice, or it was destiny
Until some other gravity
attracts your interest
Or in the depth of distance
you forget.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 6, 2012



On the bus

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On The Bus (Background Music: Max Richter “Horizon Variations”)


On the bus
I look at you
and you, and you
and think of you as loved.

I notice, suddenly, how cute
you are — those shoes
and how your feet slip into them
That chin, that slight tilt of your nose
And you, that face, that’s smiled
so many times, that has such memories
within its lines
Could be your smile right now is from the thought
of something twenty, forty years ago . . .

I do it as an exercise
I think of you as loved . . .
I find a smile has settled
on my face
And now, a visual litany
a thought parade of those I love
Recites itself unceasing
in my mind

A treasure, this
Well worth the weight of carrying
Indeed, it carries me
with all the energy I need
into my day.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 5, 2012






This body made of thought

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In this body made of thought
Made of moving, intersecting vertices
Made of whorls of cross connecting vortexes
There is a place unutterably still

A furry animal may curl and rest
So soft, so trusting, so at home
While outside, body moves
As mistress of the winds
Interchanging energetic waves

This body made of thought is hard to size
It sinks into the earth, it kisses skies
It moves with and creates the winds that rise
It’s everything reflected in its eyes

While on the inside, concentrated quiet
A weightless place, where every forming impulse
floats
before its launch in integrated motion
and after it’s received back to its home

It is a new anatomy
What book has shown us this?
And yet we saw it
And we felt it
And we named it what it is
And now that we have named it
We’ll see it more and more
Dynamic body made of thought
And its deep, quiet, potent core.

 © Wendy Mulhern
March 4, 2012