Category Archives: Earth Whispering: Poems

It’s my discipline to write a poem a day, and I post a poem here almost every day. To find a given poem or poems on a given topic, use the search bar at the right. To receive my poems by email, please subscribe, at right.

I’d love to hear your comments on any poems. To comment, click on the little speech bubble just under this text, to the right.

Coming of Age

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May you emerge bravely
from that tight, sad place
which breeds such desperate loneliness
in the family-sized scrabble
to be seen, to find respect
(the sense of home
so compromised by struggle)

It might be best
for you each to forge your way alone —
leave the family voices
behind for a while —
The love is there,
but its application
is an advanced problem —
better to start with the relative ease
of friendly strangers . . .

May you invent yourselves —
find a new face that will
let you give voice
to who you’ve always been
but haven’t dared express,
May the broad sky embrace your courage,
May you gain comfort
in the arms of new-found friends.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 9, 2014

Passage

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Hard walking, this,
as among the rolly stones along the beach —
worse, for sharp edges reach to snag,
and mire beneath them
is often quick, and my foot
sinks down unexpectedly,
and no step can be sure

But I will keep walking,
I will not stop for
all the cluttered claims of pain
or the searing cold of sudden doubt
of things I’d held so sure

This much is clear —
The act of moving is itself a strength,
and little joys still shine
from unexpected places,
and the investment over many years
of what I work to carry —
attention, faith, discipline —
will pull me through.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 8, 2014

Nexus

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At any moment,
you can be
the spark point of divinity,
the nexus of reflection,
the place where the God light
touches down
between you and another.

You can be willing,
which makes you
a tuner, an amplifier
for the ever present music
that stirs your inner infinity
and brings it up —
an offering
that unites you both in blessing
and carries your sudden comprehension
down the bright living stream of life.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 6, 2014

Particulars

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In the real world,
particulars matter —
inches and angles,
proportion and timing,
and, of all the people
you could have been with,
who it actually is.

In real love,
particulars matter,
but they are not metered or weighed
like exacting alchemical recipes.
Instead, each of these
very idiosyncratic things
becomes an astonishing bright point,
a hitherto unimagined
touch of perfection
that had to be so —
just precisely the way it is.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 5, 2014

Becoming Real

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We start to consider
what it will take to become real,
what it will take to release ourselves
from the role in the story
in which we have no power
to infuse the structure
with our integrity,
no power to ensure
our livelihood is built on justice.

We will become real
because we do have power.
We must build our world from scratch
because it can be right,
and we’re not living
till we own
all the consequences
of our actions,
till they reflect
our natural, steady,
all-embracing care.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 4, 2014

True Words

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It seemed she had forgotten them,
the way they fell, in random pattern
like raindrops shaken
from a branch
into a pond
(the ripples moving out silently
to intersect noiselessly,
patterns of expanding circles
enveloping each other)

They seemed to fall without intent,
and yet,
in the moments following,
the melody they made
(repeating and inverting,
echoing and spreading)
kept on reverberating
till their meaning
and their message
had made themselves
indelibly clear.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 3, 2014

Trusted

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We will ride home
across golden meadows,
the gracious sun glowing at our coming,
our shadows stretching royal
along the welcome road;
We will ride home
supported by the very air,
caressed by the attending breeze.

We have done well,
as was decreed at our creating;
we have been
exactly as we were intended.
This fulfillment
comes from something higher
than our forms can comprehend,
this victory
our creator’s gift to us
of the particulars
of our design

We will ride home
as was written and is now enacted,
in the rich ease of being trusted.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 2, 2014

Just before the turn

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It’s not quite time
for the quiet click
that signals
the start up of a new cycle,
not quite where the whirrings
of the measuring machinery
propel the system on
past the pause at the top of the circle
into the subtle push
before momentum picks up
and sends the circle onward . . .
Not quite time,
but we can pause,
here as anywhere,
to let our breath catch up.

©Wendy Mulhern
December 31, 2013

Completion: A Witness Circle

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Each of us in turn
opened out a little star point,
our circle’s roundness
expanding to encompass
all those bright bursts,
where our breath flowed together,
pulled along the raw emotion
and exposed softness,
drawing out the heart hum,
sucked into the poignancy
of each truth

And the arms of our shared intention
held us all,
flexing their strength
in the enormity
of what they now contained,
in breathless awe
of what we could support.

©Wendy Mulhern
December 30, 2013

Year’s End, 2013

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There will be no falling, this time,
into the end of the year,
no tumbling of untallied days,
no cache of uncounted hours
to not expect, but then to have
for languid wandering through paths
of memory . . .

These days are still measured,
still ordered — needed for the steady
mounting for the launch,
in rising hope,
into the next ascent.

©Wendy Mulhern
December 29, 2013