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.

“In my Father’s house”

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In this house
There’s room enough for everyone.
There’s room for those
who need to go slow,
whose moves are ponderous
and often hesitating,
Who may seem to forget sometimes
where they are going.

There’s room for those
who only lightly touch down
in the quick flitting of skittering motion,
Hardly here for long enough
to cast a shadow,
But wanting to have weight
and be remembered.

There’s room for those who need to lead
And those who wish to follow,
Room to blaze in brilliance,
Room to wait in silence.
Room for both those born within
And those who came from far,
Room for all to grow
and so step in to what they are.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 14, 2013


Cloud travel

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I almost can remember
Times of cloud travel,
Being so attentive and receptive
That I could move along the currents of the air
And let myself be gathered and dispersed
And turned in languid, stretching shapes,
My will as fluid as the wind’s direction,
Learning, as I went, where I was going.

It was an easy thing, upon arrival,
To center in, to grow more dense, more focused
So that I could lightly drop
from air to ground
and into solid form.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 12, 2013


The consulate of Other

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It’s a pretty big country, my mind
And there is much of it I haven’t yet explored
Rural villages and favelas
Places of hard-working love and teeming life
Broad, windy planes
Hidden, green-draped canyons . . . 

And the government there
I only recently started to question,
Started to say,
What are these voices
That preside over my moments,
Even my most private ones?
That judge my intimacy, and my observations
My emotions, and my patterns
That block my paths with traffic lights
And put barbed wire around my lovely meadows?
Who elected them? Who gave consent? 
Who ratified the constitution granting them control?

Not me.
Not the strong rivers of my body
Not the steady winds of my intentions
Not the oceans of my love
Or the strong, protective trees that feed my heart.

They are an enclave here
Installed by the country of Other
A consulate of sorts,
But it has no citizens within my border
No one needing their protection.
And there are no dwellers
In the home country of Other
(It is, for everyone, where others live —
No one has actually been there)

So, with no true souls to represent,
The consulate of Other
Has set itself as ruler in my mind.
But it has no right to reign,
It doesn’t own me
No law has set it here
And I abolish
The diplomatic ties it claimed to have.

I own my country
And I don’t need those Other rules,
Those fences, all those ugly barbs
That hemmed me in, that choked my vital movement.
I hereby free myself with this decree:
The consulate of Other is not me.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 12, 2013



Things that are not quite storms

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Let this flow through me
like virga —
like rain that doesn’t touch the ground,
that falls awhile through the sky
but then evaporates
leaving my feet dry

Let it be that I perhaps feel
a cold shaft around my ears
Let me raise my eyes
to see a span of rainbow
or some amazing rays
sifting through lines of gray

It’s OK
if all this is sublimated
and tomorrow
Steam rises from the earth
to meet the morning sun.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 10, 2013


Essences

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I start to sense —
with some surprise —
the essences of which I am comprised,
And they feel more like
softly potent nebulae
than any former figure of myself

They gather forces, lift,
roll in,
like clouds, like seas —
They shape-shift as they fly,
They gravitate like spheres,
Encounter others,
Slide into their places,
Harmonizing vectors

Who am I now?
— Something far beyond
the stories, placing me
in static scripts and roles,
Something I may learn
as I unfold.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 9, 2013


Goodbye, Baby Bird

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For Audrey, Bill, Jeremy and Nicholas


Such a little life form
But the connection runs deep —
When you follow its roots down
You are submerged in memories:
Friendships made, wild choices,
Fights and struggles, friends 
standing by —

Bonds of love made stronger,
Affection running often silent,
subterranean,
Emerging when it’s needed
for support, in grief,
for every death and every helpless pain,
Holding you until you raise your head
to bravely live another day.

Laughter and tears flow 
quickly, close together.
Spirit flits down brightly,
Brought by many angels
To help us remember
We will meet these loves again
And we will all be wiser.

Our friends who went before
Will have let their suffering go,
Will have forgiven us our failings,
Will deeply understand,
Will welcome us with their assurance
That all is well.

And this little bird will be there
Singing his human-whistle song,
the one you taught him.
He will fly around your heads
and sing you home.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 8, 2013


An Invitation

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Change my mind —
I invite you —
For though I may resist
at first,
I welcome
the free fall that comes
when my prior suppositions
are knocked away —
That airy, floating weightlessness
in which begins to coalesce
a new perspective,
And I start to grasp:
The world is bigger than I thought.
There is more room than there was before
within my mind’s horizons
For expression,
For free flying,
For opening outward and outward,
Unfolding in new bloom. 

©Wendy Mulhern
April 7, 2013


Indoor Saturday, Seattle

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Rain pelts down in some of the scenes,
Falling thickly onto the parking lot,
Rolling in sheets, low waves
following each other
down the broad slope
towards the near edge.

And elsewhere, it high-fives the waving leaves,
with patter-smack repeated in cascading rounds
as the wind rolls through.

In other scenes, the rain is tucked away
for interludes of wind alone,
Gathering the landscape
in its casual repetitious circles,
Sweeping it up in preparation
for the next course of rain.

The sun is not pictured here;
To find it, you must go back in memory
to earlier this morning, when it splashed
a few sweet swaths of warmth
across the land.

No matter, we warm-blooded creatures
And all the swelling seeds —
their code of growth impelling
their own kind of heat —
Will tend our inner suns
until the outer sun returns.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 6, 2013


Finding a way

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Let’s find the ways
that we can fit together.
Let’s find how we are family
And how a little shifting of presuppositions
Will let our odd-shaped pieces
find a way to mesh.

It’s easy enough
to be all elbows
and bony knees,
But we have soft curves, too,
where we can empathize and understand
And this,
This warm, accommodating mass,
Is what we really, really want
More than being on top,
More than being right.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 4, 2013


Garden Smiles

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Even in my shady and neglected yard
Tulips are starting to smile,
Pink edges showing forth seductive lips
against their otherwise inscrutable green.
I know this feeling —
They won’t be able
to hold their laughs inside much longer:
They will burst out, bright color
suffusing them entirely,
No longer able, or willing
to hide anything —
Letting themselves go
with the sheer joy of spring.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 3, 2013