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.

Bike Ride to Brackett’s Landing

Posted on by
Reply

 Sunny, 60 degrees

A wind that buffets me but isn’t cold
One inhale’s gift of blossom as I fly
The sun’s light touch that raises up my soul
The water’s glint as I go swiftly by
The pattern of the shadows on the concrete –
rails and steps on ramp up from the underpass
The echo of my song, sustained though incomplete,
hurled down the tunnel while I’m rolling fast
These, with the words that follow melody
Trying their rhythms on the mellow tune
that floats within me answering my tunnel cry
bring heightened pleasure to my afternoon
Ah, spring! How clear the vision you inspire!
How rich the scents! How sweet the homage you require.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 23, 2011



Love’s Plan

Posted on by
Reply
I’m not allowed to think myself alone
and struggling to find where I belong
Each effort to invent myself will fall
as sure as piles of sand against the sea.
So it is with things I haven’t done
and times I’ve been so proud, and been so wrong
There never was a chance for them at all
as long as I had hopes to rescue me.
A precious part of Love’s unique design
is how the loss of what I have called mine
will reset my assumptions, so I find
identity at one with the divine.
So, meekly cleansed, I then can lift my face
to Love’s bright pattern and my perfect place.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 22, 2011



Weather Report II

Posted on by
Reply
No, this isn’t about the first day of spring, except in the way it was colder and wetter than hoped for, and felt bleaker since I was expecting warmer.  It’s rather about the way a cold front, when it comes in, needs to move through before it clears.  The argument I wrote about yesterday was not, despite what the poem seemed to indicate, solved at once.  Today I felt bleak and bleary, and grouchy.  But I took a bike ride in the late afternoon, for fresh air and to find a poem.  I liked the poem I found – the rhythm appropriately pugnacious.  And the ride and the poem revived me.  
A riddle: why not settle into grouchiness
growl, baleful, at the fickle sky and shake your fist
succumb to world’s weight drag down into slouchiness
call it one of those days that – face it – won’t be missed?
Indeed, it seems the path of least resistance
Why summon up the needed grim persistence?
When has the sun come out through sheer insistence?
To find success would seem to need a sixth sense
But maybe if you wait a bit you’ll find one
Surprising uplift can come up behind one
and tickle evil feelings till they’re undone
and dissipate like fog banks in the bright sun
The answer: sure, be grouchy if you must
The light will still come reignite your trust.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 21, 2011



Seasoned love

Posted on by
Reply
My husband and I have been married for a long time.  On my bike ride yesterday, I was reflecting how solid I feel about our love.  Wishing I could give encouragement to young couples who might be in the throes of tension and passion, wishing I could somehow say to them don’t worry, lean into love – it’s stronger than all your dramas.
It also may go without saying that not every moment has been rosy.  I was thinking about that on the ride, too – and how I really think we’ve moved beyond the place of angry dramas.  So it was funny when, on our walk this afternoon, my husband turned around abruptly and started storming back.  “I don’t need this,”  he said.  “This is not what I came for.”  I walked on, the distance widening between us.
I wasn’t really upset.  I think it’s true that our love is a solid enough cushion to keep our sensibilities unscratched.  But I had been looking for a poem, and the one that started to come reflected my position.  It also reflected my sense of the power of love.
I didn’t think I’d share it.  It’s (sort of) dirty laundry, not showing either of us in our best light. (Him, because I say he grumbles, etc.  Me, because I say he grumbles, etc.) But I like the poem, and no other ones sprang to pen tip.  So here it is:
The argument continues in the poet’s thought:
Admit it: it takes more than wit and gumption
It takes great love and humbleness of heart
to navigate your minefields of assumptions
though I can take no credit for my art
The Love that guides me through them is much larger
than what romance or reason might require
The universal law that is in charge here
will save us both from your reactive fire
So now, though you’ve withdrawn into your grumbles
of what you don’t have time for, and your cold
rehearsal of your valid indignation
here is the place of peace that I can hold:
The Love that made us burns as love within us
and it will lift us, bless us, purge us, win us.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 20, 2011



For Heather, approaching the super moon

Posted on by
Reply
I remember you
moonfaced
miraculous
pulling my life’s tides
We went to see the super moon
to watch it swing over the ocean
to be women – four of us.  You at eight months
qualified
in the mystical incantation
decreed by Sus
who understood these things deeply
earth mother that she was.
I remember
the weight of you, in the blue backpack
but Sus must have carried you, too
for I remember seeing
your eyes wide, reaching your small hand
to touch the old growth trees
on the way to the beach
We moved as one in those days
You called me “me” and you “you.”
I can still feel in my hand
how it felt to your hand
the spongy/prickly, gray-green, furry/lacy
intricate web of moss and bark
your eyes registering ancient connection.
“Super moon tomorrow,” the news said.
“The last one was eighteen years ago.”
I remember.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 18, 2011


Fractured Discourse

Posted on by
Reply
Yesterday I followed, on the site of the Academy of American Poets, a discourse between a white male poet and a black female poet about race, and a series of letters that she then invited to open up the dialog.  One point made was that the community of poets was itself a small, white group, dripping with privilege, though thinking their modest salaries made them immune to such designation.  I started thinking the issue was maybe not so much what people choose to say about race as who is saying it, whose voice gets the chance to be heard.  And that this particular society of poets was perhaps a small group, and there were others, but their circles might never intersect.
Also yesterday, incensed by things I was hearing from the far right, I started to pen an apology to President Obama:
“I fear we are a nation of buffoons
I witnessed it on Youtube yesterday . . .”
(that’s as far as I got)
These two threads of thought wove together to form the following:
Trying to Make Ourselves Heard
We speak in fractured space
Our stories are refracted
confined within our shards
that cut off interaction
Our words reflect back inward
from the walls of our partitions
and no one on the outside
can hear us anymore
What does it matter to them what we have to say?
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
. . . . . babel . . . .
And so they left off to build the city.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 17, 2011



Two for Japan

Posted on by
Reply
My life walks on with its normal considerations, and I grumble inwardly about the weather (windy, rainy, raw) and the time change, while in Japan everything has been turned upside down.  What about the tsunami?  What about that which stops everything?  Attention turns from Libya to Japan, though the fierce dramas unfolding in Libya and Bahrain continue.  As does the sniping in Afghanistan, and the myriad struggles in Africa.  I guess I have no choice but to live my own life, where I am.  And, as long as it’s not disturbed, proceed as normal.  Homework, life aspirations, weddings in the family . . . 
But here are two for Japan:
I.
Just a trifled shuffling of the earth
and all that seemed established came unmoored
swept and tossed and flowing, falling downward
in a moment wasted, mired and marred
plans and dreams, like cars and houses carried
creaking, from the hopes that held them fast
a stark today; tomorrow has been buried
left in the jumbled rubble of the past.
Of death and what it means – who can say
if they’re set free, or face horrendous trials
but the survivors – what they face – oh let us pray
for healing for their decimated isles
and let us pause in silence for their sorrow
what came to them may come to us tomorrow.
II.
Here and now, the only truth is goodness
whatever has been spewed and spilled and tumbled
Here and now, the quiet space of promise
of character that rises from the rubble
Here and now, hands reach out in compassion
People stop, rethink their frenzied paths
Hearts are inundated with emotion
and grasp the anchored love that holds them fast
“We will rebuild,” they say, “and stronger, better.”
“It’s what we’re here to do, and so we must.”
We see the triumph of determination
the solid impulse where they place their trust
We never wish such sharp calls to survive
but here and now, this people is alive.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 15, 2011



Lurching Forward

Posted on by
2
My family, befuddled by the lurch of springing forward
totters through the starting steps of day
We stumble toward the afternoon at risk of crashing floor-ward
It isn’t our design to live this way
In nature’s wisdom, light’s return comes incrementally 
a quiet step on each side of the day
But commerce grabs the hour of evening greedily
without a care what we may have to say
It turns its gears and spits us night for morning
We reel and grumble to our daily tasks
But then our equilibrium adjusts itself, and slowly
we rise from depths towards what the morning asks
No worries – light’s swift wings will overtake us
bear us up where true spring can embrace us.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 15, 2011



Finding your voice

Posted on by
Reply
A friend posted a link to a video of a high school valedictorian who used her speech to criticize the system that she had slaved for through the years of her schooling.  She urged students to find their own voices, and not succumb to the pressure to be molded into automatons for the system of corporate economy.  
I tried to shield my own children from this system.  I said, as a new parent, “Children are born knowing who they are.  My goal is that my children still know when they get through school.”  And, I think, to a great extent, they do know.  But my heart went out to this valedictorian for her courage and the task ahead of her, knowing from my own experience that re-discovering who you are can be a monumental task.
The Valedictorian
She said she wished no more to do as bidden
 – too long a slave to school’s arcane demands
She hoped to find where her own spark was hidden
to open out her life with her own hands
She found it her most difficult assignment
the voices of the system so entwined
within her thought, she couldn’t seem to find it
What did she want? What, here, was her own mind?
The layers, like cabbage leaves so tightly wrapped
her voice so far inside as to be silent
while criticisms, cynical and apt
mimic her voice to snipe at her alignment
Take heart, oh Daughter – what your wish has summoned
will rise, will decompress, will overcome.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 13, 2011


Thoughts make themselves known

Posted on by
Reply
If I hadn’t tried to write it in a poem, the thought, a little glimmer, would have expressed itself in far different ways.  Did, in fact; I wrote a page in my journal about cleaning the house while thoughts hovered just at the edge of my accepting them – borderline negative, but held at bay by some impervious membrane.  I came to the place of seeing how much the same we all are, for all our sense of singularity and frequent isolation.  We all need to bring forth that within us which makes us who we are.  In poetry, it came out like this:
There is no existential fact of night
the word speaks of the endless depth of space
the field wherein the play of stars is staged
Each star gives tribute to the light
Each star must serve the existential light
the pulse within, essential churning force
which rises out of need and tumbles forth
We see their sharp travail across the night
We see their offering across the night
and know we, too, must ever do the same
we too must birth our inner urgent flame
Each life gives tribute to the light.


©Wendy Mulhern
March 12, 2011