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.

A Wee Bit O’ Green

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Almost spring
Almost Irish
Altogether blessed
By seeing for a moment
that all inclusive motion
River of the whole bright universe
Carrying us all 
in its ecstatic fall of joy
Everything suspended in its current

Flowing with it, we don’t sense its speed
Or how its ever-presence meets our need
Yet if our ears once notice its resounding rush
Or if our skin once feels its equipollent push
How can we help but feel transported, lifted
And in the miracle of life, supremely gifted

Almost spring
Almost Irish
In the rare, transcendent view
that senses nature’s ancient blessings
ever new.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 17, 2012


City of Illusion

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I realize it’s been a while
that I’ve been walking through a mist
thick with projected images
nothing I can touch
I walk right through them
What I reach to grasp
stays where it is, my hand closes
on empty space, my own fingers—
nothing more.  And yet my feet
find purchase, there is gravity
I can close my eyes and move my feet
and tell by touch and weight
what’s here that’s real
And I can sink into the solidness
of that which satisfies
and by persistent practice
retrain my eyes
and find a way to make my vision clear —
to focus on the things that really are.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 15, 2012


Waking up is hard to do

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Waking up is hard to do
Not only in the so-called morning
in the shuffle of avoiding
the pre-dawn alarm

Breaking an illusion takes
intensity of focus
and a steady concentration
and a willingness to shift
and notice:

What I thought was solid ground
is not
And where I thought I stood
I really wasn’t
And all that I was sure was real
All that I’d strung my hopes across
has never been what held me up at all

What I am, and what I’m standing on
is something else.  It has a different gravity
It follows different laws.
The brightness of awakeness overcomes the force
of every predetermined lockstep course
and every limitation we surmise
that drains the light and laughter from our eyes

Standing up for light
may be a struggle
Waking up is hard to do
but worth the trouble.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 14, 2012


Summons

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My touch reached you
Between worlds, you told me —
You felt me there as soft cirrus
Searching wisps that drifted
Through the doors of consciousness
Changing as they went
My fingers were, perhaps, songs
Planes of my skin
A blend of shifting colors
Pulsing through your light, transcendent form
I, awake in this world
Waited solid
My slow stroke 
Inviting your return.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 13, 2012


The family of plants

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I’m not so far
From the family of plants 
I know about roots and shoots—
The steady subterranean seeking for sustenance
Something to hold onto
Something to stretch into
Branching out pathways of deft exploration
Anchoring me in my knowing . . .

Intrepid shoots pushing out against gravity
Greening out leafily into the light
Finding my being by how I am growing
Moving in dazed phototropic delight
Life has its signature
Written in each of us
Everything living can read it
Everything living has tendrils that reach us
Everything living is needed.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 12, 2012



All I want

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(background music Isaac Shepard “All Smiles”)



All I want
is everything —
It’s not too much to ask
All I want is oneness
To soar in tune
in the surging seething symphony
of being
To be the roaring pounding flow
of all things living
To have my own song
constantly meet its harmony
My rhythm locked ecstatically
in polyrhythmic counterpoint
My down-bounce catapulting
someone else’s flight
All I want
in this moment
is the bright contact
that multiplies light
That pulses back the richest chord
and wraps us
in its sacred ring of sound.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 11, 2012



Cats’ Eyes

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I, too, have been entranced
by cats’ eyes
Limpid pools compelling entrance
Slow blink confirming contact
Sharing the acknowledgement of secrets
Ancient as the lore of cats
Silent as unfathomed depth
Hinted by the stillness
Or the slow wave of a tail

The cat’s eyes told me:
We, too
can fall totally
unhesitating, unrestrained
In spite of all our surface cat constraints
Into the wide secret
of love.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 10, 2012



Being One

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Together we are

so much older
than how we think of you and I
It’s said our DNA is from the stuff of stars
concocted in their furnace
in the ancient skies

The blood we share
knows that it’s one ocean
It doesn’t feel the boundaries between
It pulses through us in a steady motion
Reveals that we are what we’ve always been

Though atomized for now
we are one body
We long for nothing more than going home
to where we feel the fall of every heartbeat
Each keeping our own rhythm
though we breathe as one
To move as one fulfills us primally
Our wave reverberating to eternity.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 9, 2012


(background music: Max Richter “Interior Horses”)



Tea in Wales

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Because of gratitude—
Its calmness and the way it spread
soft smoothing over edges of my day
I’ve just remembered tea in Wales

In autumn marked by bright and dark
of thundershowers and rainbows
Expansive hills and warm close rooms
to shelter us from cold

And tea with milk that must be cream
because its butter kissed my lips
while its soft steam
enhanced the coziness
of that sweet scene

So now
Like shared discovery of magic places
A buttery warmth spreads over me
and leaves its traces
Here where I need this peace
and these bright graces
to meet the challenges
the day occasions
How bountiful this gratitude
That now avails me
of the memory
of tea in Wales.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 8, 2012



Celestial Bodies

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In the wide domain of space
ungoverned by an overarching gravity
You fly along a path perhaps not knowing
what force has launched you,
where you may be going
what bodies you may meet
and what attraction
may draw you into one another’s orbit

Once there, you may not know what gesture
might pull the circle closer,
spin you tighter, faster
Or which off-handed move
may loose the orbit
and send you drifting off
on pathways fast diverging

Where you may wonder afterwards
what it was you did
or who it was — if it was even you
or if you had a choice, or it was destiny
Until some other gravity
attracts your interest
Or in the depth of distance
you forget.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 6, 2012