The sun scorches us
The wind dries us
We only notice on the edges
of our work and our wonder
The brambles trip and prick us,
Some insects bite —
We carry all these things
with a nascent understanding
of how we are owned by this land
and how our love emerges
as we are eroded,
how in this weathering
we become capable,
in this honing
we become something different —
More of the earth, less of the city,
closer to both the land and the sky.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 3, 2015
The sun goes down without coloring,
as confident as it came up,
its gold still shimmering
as shadows rise in the grass,
gracing the underwings of evening birds
and whole bodies
of myriad insects
The hills behind which it dips
are already somber,
the fields are hastening
to join the visual hush
the air cools quickly
when the sun retires,
bird song continues
on into the dusk.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 2, 2015
We are marvelous creatures
and our instincts are unerring —
See how we fall like water,
see how we follow the veins of continuity
that still flow through the rubble
of our chopped up lives
See how we leave the lies
that said these broken stones
were natural, that the meaning
of our lives is to collect them,
pile them together
in some kind of race
to be someone with a complete structure
We sink beneath the stones,
We find what flows,
We find what holds together,
We find the land
So we escape to find ourselves
no longer partial,
no longer fractured, disconnected,
no longer severed from ourselves —
So we stretch out in how we know
that we are whole.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 1, 2015
Ah, what have you shouldered?
— Put it down —
What have you swallowed?
— Spit it out —
At this time of heaviness,
in this time of lies,
In the face of revolution
or worse, suffocation
The one thing that is needed
is not for you to go down
(though the depths cry out, cry out,
though something calling itself conscience
demands your howling)
The one thing that is needed
is for you to demonstrate
(if only to yourself)
the survival move of shrugging off the weight
and letting the afflatus
bear you to the surface,
letting the stillness
radiate,
letting your truth
rise.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 28, 2015
Love touches every surface
as eagerly as water seeping
into soil, finding each tiny crevice
and filling it suddenly
Love goes in infinitely small,
embracing every grain of thought,
of being. The intimacy of being known
closer than I ever could imagine,
of knowing something by the way
it touches me
opens me out
like a chestnut frond —
so much unfolding
from one little bud.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 27, 2015
We looked around for the enemy
but all we could see
were faces wanting to be loved —
some with glints of longing,
some with aching hope,
some afraid to even
look up and see
No one was standing
with bared teeth
waiting to devour
or in the inscrutable ice
that blandly wields a pen
to steal the lives of millions
Instead we saw the power
that kindles kinship from afar,
that brings each one back
from dim benighted stances
We saw the incredulous
but then willing
dropping of forms,
of roles, of strictures —
we saw the relief,
grateful and repentant
of coming home.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 25, 2015
“They shall teach no more every man his neighbor saying ‘know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, saith the Lord.”
We shall not teach
the steps for finding goodness:
try this diet, exercise or meditation,
renounce your ego to become enlightened,
adopt these habits of communication,
release your fears, embrace your shadow
We won’t be offering
all those helpful paths
to fix yourself, to heal your life
to find out who you really are
Because you’ll know.
We all will, from the inside.
We’ll know the bright joy
that springs up within
permeating everything
bringing forth dynamic understanding
opening the infinite dimensions
of what we see we’ve always known we are.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 24, 2015
Confronted suddenly
with such fullness
I am left without words —
the place where they were
has gone liquid
and it flows around and permeates
all the pores of my perception
I don’t respond
for I am transfixed
almost clumsily
I lean into the contact
My tongue has assumed the aspect
of infants drinking
I feel the suction
against my soft palate
It’s time to fly
time to cry or cry out
time to throw my whole being
against or into the vortex
(I don’t know which)
Time for gratitude
for overwhelm, for wonder
for this Life.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 23, 2015
Goodness and mercy
will be in my wake
in the places I have been
after I’ve gone through
Goodness and mercy
will be the result
of my presence
like flowers blooming in footprints
All the days of my life
So I shall dwell
in the happy certainty
not only of having done no harm
but of blessing
I shall not want
for all my hope
is thus fulfilled.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 22, 2015
My soft-shod feet
fall quietly
along the pavement,
then the gravel, then the curb I balance on
A metal door rolls open to admit
a young athletic cyclist
into a dark spire of glass and steel
that makes its statement
between the water and the freeway
shadowing the scruffy grasses
where homeless people pitch their tents
I walk along the edges of the city,
don’t see many people, though the land
is all but absent underneath the influence
I walk along the edges of the system, too —
not caught up in the hum of jobs and money,
not forced to be here, not incarcerated,
not forced either, to buy in
to all the ways that I could be constricted
I feel a watchfulness around my eyes
but not much commentary. A phrase
flits through my thought:
“so many different flavors of slavery”
but I don’t pursue it
There’s a way I walk through here
where I see something else —
the power inherent in each set of eyes
to melt away all kinds of walls
through the simple and singular truth
of I Am.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 21, 2015