Tulips play
Mother May I –
The frigid day
arrests them. They
stand, green heads pert
alert
awaiting
the permission of warmth
to step into their colors
©Wendy Mulhern
April 16, 2011
Arrested Spring
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Category Archives: Earth Whispering: Poems
Lowering the Standard
I opened a book today that my husband gave me for Christmas years ago – Bill Moyers’ The Language of Life, a Festival of Poets. I hadn’t really read it much at the time, but now it is intensely relevant and important to me. Though I took many things from my day’s reading, the one I will share today is the information that a poet named William Stafford had a practice of writing a poem a day (as I do!). And when asked what he did when he was having a bad day, he said he simply lowered his standards.
This gives me permission, and I think I need to let myself write poems that don’t aspire to goodness, to keep them and me from getting pompous. So today I will share a “poem” about my blog stats.
My sad confession is that I often haunt my blog looking for signs of having made a connection. There is a stats page associated with the blog, which tracks page views – how many there are, where they come from, which pages were viewed, etc. So I was surprised today when there was a sudden spike of activity from Russia. And last week a similar but smaller one from China. My poem is about those spikes:
Did nineteen people read my poems in Russia?
One spike at three o’clock this afternoon?
Was it a class, something they were doing –
Could they even read it, was there a discussion?
Or does my stats page give a wrong impression –
Perhaps it was some automated creeper
that opened up my blog but with no reader
just marched on through in mindless blind procession
I’d like to think that in some far off land
an energy connection had been made
an arc of our humanity find ground
across a gap of culture, time and space
and though I doubt this count is realistic
I must confess I’m glad for the statistic.
April 14, 2011
Love light
Love casts a light on those my eyes behold
and summons all my senses to support
and vivify the image that unfolds
impelling me to love them more and more.
All that I see of them I also feel
in lines of liquid corresponding flow
within me, tracing part for part
his hand, her cheekbone; mine, internal, glow.
They light me up like that – their smiles
send laughing waterfalls cascading
through and through me all the while
chimes of joy keep celebrating.
This reverberation, humming to my core
is what I’m here for: every day’s reward.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 13, 2011
Going the distance
How can I hope, day after day
to keep on finding things to say?
If I have touched essential grace
have laid it out so all can feel
its brightness and its deep embrace
what more, then, is there to reveal?
The answer comes in simple clues:
Each life is noted, each is news –
each pine needle bejeweled in dew
each tulip that unveils its hue –
There’s always something new in how
each living thing proclaims its now
So I can witness, marvel, and attend
to what is now, and now will never end.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 12, 2011
City Musings
I started to compose a poem in my mind as I walked down the city streets to the basement office where I volunteer every other week. The idea seemed good, and I had the first two lines and the framework for several more. I thought they would come quickly back when I could sit down and write them. But at the office other things came up, and I didn’t get to think about the poem till I got home. And then it was something like waking up from a dream that had seemed very profound but that I couldn’t make sense of at all. I remembered a few words but not how they came together. After I thought I would give up, it came together, though I think it’s quite different from what was in my mind earlier:
Bully without a pulpit
I walked, entreating the collective mind
Look: who you are is not defined
by what you buy, or tastes refined
through careful choice of things designed
to show your status and proclaim
alignment with some product’s name
I stepped into the crosswalk, feeling wise
to turn from all the billboards for the prize
of seeing how much better we are known
for what we’ve striven for, what we have honed
through stretching into what the day demands
through what we make with our own hands
I liked my words – I thought they would compel
except I didn’t know who I could tell.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 11, 2011
Isaiah 52:3
ye have sold yourselves for nought. . . .
ah, verily
we have sold ourselves for a bargain:
our communities
for low prices at Costco
our neighborhoods
for hundreds of channels on Comcast
our livelihoods
for cheap wares from China . . .
sackcloth and ashes!
for we have not been conquered
no brave stand against the cannons
no soul bracing acts of raw courage
no
we just sat here.
ye have sold yourselves for nought,
and ye shall be redeemed without money.
we shall not be bought!
we shall be redeemed
with that which can’t be bought
but can be given.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 10, 2011
End of Day
I close my eyes and ask the energy
from my industrious dogged exertion,
like tide returning to come back to me,
restore me in a slow and strong immersion.
In steady march, all of the day’s demands
required my work, persistence and attention;
I powered through them all, and though my hands
grew raw, accomplished my intention.
There was a place of stillness when I felt
a moment’s rest was all that I would need
and though the space of peacefulness was well
my weary head demanded that I heed
the time of tides, that can’t be rushed, must flow
at their own pace, and when they’ve covered me, I’ll know.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 8, 2011
Liquid Mirth
Would you like some liquid mirth?
It glints in the internal sun
It splashes brightly at the simple living sounds
the ringing clink of dishes in the sink
the satisfying clack of cupboards closed
It rushes from the throats of birds
whose spring sound summons lightness
though the sun itself is hidden
Would you like some liquid mirth?
I got it from my son, who played so well
Then we were driving, and he said Don’t!
Don’t make that noise; I chortle; he says don’t
make that one either – it’s weird
But I want to make all the sounds
the clicks, the hums, the burbles
the plocks, the thwings, the brip brip brips
and the warble of my brim-full soul.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 7, 2011
For Love
You had a taste of Truth – it was enough
to waken an insatiable thirst
that made you climb a tree, and beg for more
and walk in circles through the fields and say
“Why did I never know of you before?”
So after that, you made the resolution
to drink that light until it fills you too full
to be contained within confined constraints
– swell like a seed until the skin splits
and peels away revealing it’s not you
and never was – that what you’ve always been
is something else, made of stars and milk-white
innocence, and open eyes, so you can
break out of all that holds you in this shape
slip out of that old ego like a slim snake
and walk in nameless luminescence.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 6, 2011
A Mom’s Lament
He plays the cello suite
©Wendy Mulhern
April 5, 2011
in a wrong tuning
The lowest string not dropped,
each bass note
a step too high – rude barging
into an otherwise soothing song
It is a musical joke.
He plays with his eyes closed
shifting inexorably
towards the horizontal
from which he leveraged himself,
with great groanings
demagnetized himself, most laboriously,
from the computer screen
after playing, lying down with his travel guitar,
a lament about having to rise.
He digresses to trim his fingernails
But I shall have music. Eventual music.
It is my hope. It would be a sweet fruit
of weary repetitious prodding.
I am here to encourage him
to curl into his space among the animals
on the bed. To occupy it
so it won’t pull him so quickly back.
How is it that this job belongs to me?
Or have I brought it down on my own head?
by too high expectations or by being too low key?
this daily nagging (begging) I have come to dread?
©Wendy Mulhern
April 5, 2011