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.

Legacy

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for me and you, and for our parents

You don’t need to be sorry
about your legacy
You needn’t doubt
the impartation of your gifts
These things have never stood
on your performance, your success or failure

Sure as the stars
The light of your being
has sent its beams
and the continuity
of your essence
still streams
steadfast across light years
timeless and unchanged

Whatever gifts you tried to package
Tried, with fumbling hands
to deliver to your children
Whatever they have said
or misconstrued
or failed to see
Your light has always shone on, true

And always shone, as pure
in their bright being
Nothing you have done
could dim it
Nothing you didn’t do
could ever let it fail

It’s what you are
that blesses them
that always has —
Not something you determined —
Something that was given you
before the world began
as it was given them
Rest easy 
for your love
has ever been enough.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 19, 2012



Soul holding

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And when he leaves his home each day

Embarks upon his sea of consciousness
Alone along the arc he travels
through crowds and conversations, correspondences
Who holds him, stands beside him, with him, guards him?

And when she hugs her cat
and leaves for work
in shoes she chose to play the part
along the corridor down which she walks
so far from any touch or recognition
Who holds her? In whose heart resides her image?
Who keeps a constant cord of close connection
belays her, holds the strong affection
to draw her home, remind her who she is?

How is it that we spend
the vast part of our day alone
tossed in the waves of our perceptions?
So dear it is to hold in thought the anchor
of someone who is holding us within

Then, friends, let us each lift up a soul
For something so intense
it is astonishing
how light they are
And that’s because they’re held already
Glistening as strings on Spirit’s harp
Suspended intricate and steady
Still grateful for our touch
that wakes them up.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 18, 2012

Picture: Jennifer McCurdy, Gilded Wind Nest. Photo by Gary Mirando.  Background music: Max Richter “Andras”

Lullaby for Edward

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Spirit current, take this man
Move as him in light and sound
Bear him on a journey of remembering

Fill the hollow of his soul
Let him know himself as whole
Coursing joy and steady strength engendering

All that he has been since long before the dawn of time
Let it flow through him in a reverberating chime
Bring him through the shadow of these weary days
Fill his heart with laughter and his lips with praise
Let him fly in surety that everywhere he’s roamed
He’s always been in your embrace
And so forever home.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 17, 2012



Touch Hunger

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Now that I know about my own touch hunger
I see touch hunger everywhere I look
Faces longing to be stroked
Bodies leaning out toward one another
The boy whose agitated energy
moved him in an oscillating “8”
Just like my daughter moved
when she was small and needed to be held

We live in an emaciated state
Not knowing what we crave, how to relate
Our bodies stick-like, prickly, stiff
from starving for our basic daily touch

Caged off by fears, by norms, by talk of sin
We need to open gates, and so begin
to feed each other’s hunger
so we can
fill up our souls, and so be whole again.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 16, 2012



The calculus of need

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In the old assessment
To speak of need is to confess a lack
Admitting need is weakness
And to ask for what you need
entails a sacrifice
of dignity, of power, of position —
a painful act of desperate submission

In another way of seeing
Needing is the interlock of love —
The contact that inspires our hearts
to gratitude
I need you as I need the air I breathe
Not contemplating lack
but just acknowledging
how sweetly and how deeply we’re connected
Not bound, but bonded —
in our unity perfected

Performing once again
the calculus of need
where we consider what to claim
what to concede
To leave the old assessment for the new will be
the algorithm that will set us free.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 15, 2012



Plea for a new economy

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All the well-paved roads
just lead to wasteland —
The greatest mecca now the shopping mall
where everything is so meticulously placed
and if they could
they would commodify the soul
Refract it into little mirrored packages
so it can make the stuff they sell attractive
tell us if we want some soul
we have to buy it
and to buy it, first we have to sell it
Many are the nets of thought to have us so believe
So deceived, we’re bought and sold
and so enslaved

But let us move into the clarity of day
And see that in reality
there is no “they”
And if we see the roads are broad and yet
their promises are hollow
and just because they have bright signs
we’re not compelled to follow
We may envision some more perfect way

A modest road, that winds beside a river
where folks on bicycles and feet could wander
A common square where people daily gather
for music, song and dance, discussion, laughter
Where there’s no price or prison for the soul
And in our giving and receiving 
we are whole.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 14, 2012


Whether or not you already know:

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I love you.
These are powerful words
Not to be said lightly
They have consequences

The man I spoke with yesterday said
People have no idea what love is
They have no point of reference
They say “I love you, I love you,”
But they just want
To be nurtured, to be supported, to be accepted
They will leave when their need changes.

I know what love is
And I love you
I’m not saying it lightly
These words have consequences
And I know what they are

I hold you in my heart
Yes, I nurture you
Yes, I support you
Yes, I accept you
And I welcome your infinity.

I love you, and so
I willingly enter
The space where our boundaries dissolve
And we float, weightless and unformed
So at the impulse from the infinite
We can respond as one.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 11, 2012



Sacred Unfolding

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Around a seed of thought
Substance gathers
The infant leaf
Forms itself 
From nothing
And the essence of everything —
Water from the network of the soil
Last year’s sun released from secret storage
Love that calls them to the service
Of the timeless pattern

It forms itself
Pleated, furled, or crumpled
In its tiny space
Its weightless impulse summons energy
More than it can hold within its sphere
So it expands
Unfolds, unfurls, stretches out
To raise its tender head
And join the dance of spring.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 10, 2012



The Dawn of Spring

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The trees arose before the dawn of spring
The running of their sap waking them up
Pulsing invisible and potent
Underneath their bark
Inciting buds to swell

And now their scent
Sent delicate through branch and blossom
Has touched the air with some delicious summons
To wake me up
The way the sap aroused the trees
Aliveness pumping through my piqued awareness

Ah Spring!  Such gratitude you raise
As you invoke this nameless joy
That fills my days.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 9, 2012