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.

My body’s yes

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What is it
that calls my body’s yes
in the middle of the night?
— The yes that knows
with the certainty of weather
how to move —
How to flow along the thermal currents
Steady as progressing clouds across the sky
Soft as air
Warm as breath
Smooth as steam

What is the I Am in you
that calls forth this response
somewhere beneath the layers
of directed thought?
I found myself, within myself,
in awe,
Embodying a grace I’d never known,
Inhabiting a place of
effortless, continuous engagement
With some imperative
delectable
ineffable
presence of you.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 11, 2013


Focusing

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This realigning of what matters
is like a massive shift in focus
in which vertical lines
trade places with each other
and what I thought was space between
is coming into view as solid
and what I thought was solid
may turn out to not be anything.

And in my reassessment
I still haven’t found
the rare bird
on which I hoped my lens was trained
but those leaves
in bright and waxy detail
stand out, surreal, 
against surrounding greens.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 10, 2013


On Mortality: Four Observations

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I.
“It’s all over now, baby blue.”
In the buckling of the sky
(blue, almost serene, beyond my windshield,
Turned, in my mind’s eye
by the lyrics of a song)
I felt how creatures die
in the final overwhelm
that overcomes
the desperate, rising impulse
of life plunged into struggle.
They shut their eyes tight,
They curl up
They let it all go —
A sudden shift in priorities —
It all goes quite easily:
They open their eyes
And it is gone.

II.
Maybe each time we awake,
We die from the dream we were in
All those scenes
So swiftly forgotten
in the insistent brushstrokes
of the day’s reality.
Maybe we have died thousands of times,
or more (he said)
And it is something in our creature memory:
We know what it is.

III.
Against the backdrop of impassive sky
These tragedies roll out,
These cries of anguish,
All this waste, this grief,
The drudgery, the disappointment
And the clamor for relief
Yet we will give our all for life
Until the final moment comes.

IV.
I don’t intend to die today
But if I did
I would be satisfied.
I’ve sown true seeds,
I’ve shared my gift,
I’ve known great love
I have more words
But these could be enough.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 9, 2013


Taste of spring

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Days like this
I remember
How the sun can come for me —
How, even if I face it from a place of stress,
Numb to any radiance or peace,
Its shining will start to reach through —
Soft warming on my face,
Dazzle of water sparkles on my eyes,
Subtly winning ground in my attentions
Till I am undone,
Abandon all preoccupations
And stretch, catlike,
Into the luxury of its gift.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 8, 2013


Getting home

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There are so many ways
to get back to your foundation.
You can get there by rising —
Your upward thrust locating,
through its balance,
the deep support that sends you on your way

You can get there by falling —
Tumbling for mercy,
Needing everything,
Drawing your aid from your loves.

You can get there in frenzy —
Flailing till everything extra burns out
and nothing is left but the core.
You can get there in stillness —
Settling into your peace
till you know nothing more.

You can forge for it,
Resolute and alone,
Brave and courageous
till all the resistance is done.
You can find it in liquid togetherness,
Gathering strength as you pool
in a deep, shared surrender.

One thing is sure:
You are destined to find it,
Certain as anything known —
There are so many kinds of returning,
So many ways to get home.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 7, 2013



Awakening

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Another layer of dissolving dream
sits like mist a little distant from my eyes
I peer to see the sun — pale disk,
emerging
Asserting its dominion on the day

The mist, dispersing, opens out my vision
The ground, now oddly solid
sends its message through my soles:
This is the earth on which you have been walking
This is the contact that will find you whole

I realize that I’d wondered why, while grasping
at all those things, I never really held one
Or why in running towards those goals
I never reached them,
Why the teachers’ lessons
Felt confusing, hopeless, boring
Why I always plodded
When I felt I should be soaring —
Now I know.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 6, 2013


Standing

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We’ve been through this before
but this time we’re wiser
and will stand unflinching
as all those shapes pass through us —
those illusions of ourselves,
walking and moving
but absent our deep desire —
ourselves moving in tracks
set up to have us shuffle
mostly mindless,
mostly lifeless,
through our days

This time we won’t 
fall in step with them
For our roots reach down
so much deeper —
through rocks, through magma,
to the mingling with the very core of things,
And our crowns,
full as the most established of the guardian trees —
Our crowns dance with the stars.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 5, 2013


Sanctuary

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This is a poem I co-wrote with a friend. We alternated lines. Then had just a little tweaking to make it fit together. And brainstormed the title.

Sanctuary

I sing love shapes onto a canvas of stillness.
Slow ripples blend outwards, overlapping
As galaxies of air expand and contract.
We are here! breathing this moment,
Lost in a timeless sanctuary
Found in formless unity,
Emptiness dancing with ineffable being.

Softly, the love shapes of my song return
As if they were the only thing I’d ever seen
and wrap themselves around me like a lullaby —
A warm blanket in winter
of velvet midnight sky.
Higher light dives into mysterious depths
Aurora borealis for my love-struck eyes.

©Chris Capogna and Wendy Mulhern
March 3, 2013


Touching Home

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You fill me:
Just this time of standing,
foreheads touching,
recharges me
like water slowly filling up
a tall bottle.
I feel the strength flow in,
still knowing that I need more —
need to stand here just a bit longer,
while each moment is exactly what I need.

And when we lie stretched out
along each other,
there are other touch points
where the inrush of your essence
feeds my core.
It’s a refreshment like
swimming in the clear, bright coves
I’m only sure I’ve swum in 
in my dreams —
impossibly perfect,
inevitably pure.

So I return,
feeling the need again
to touch home —
Home to my tender soul,
Home in you.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 2, 2013

Rededication

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Though I have been distracted
by all these thoughtscapes
with their shifting edges
and their treacherous crevasses —
cliff faces thrust up suddenly,
clefts and foldings that engulf
huge chunks of time —

Though I’ve been distracted by
considerations of relative fortune,
and what is given
and what is owed,
evaluations of trusts and loyalties,
and what’s conjectured
and what is known,

Today I stop,
to let my thought sink down,
steady as a stone,
to its home
where I know 
none of these thoughtscapes ever mattered —
They have no weight, no substance,
no attraction
and they can’t distract me anymore.

Today I dedicate myself again
to the pre-time worth
of everything we are,
the silent eloquence
of every vital heart,
our precious heat,
our unremitting glow.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 1, 2013