Let’s all go down to the river –
now I understand
why people travel there to pray –
there’s no stain on any of us
too set in to be washed clean
The current is strong
and the spring is so pure
that every single thing
can be absolved,
every misstep forgiven
We will look up through wet eyes
and we will see each other,
maybe for the first time,
we’ll recognize, in each other, who we are –
the ones who only ever wanted
to be love.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 13, 2020
What does it take
for me to fathom
that freedom is mine,
is ours, for the taking?
That no condition can hold us hostage,
that no concerted cavalcade of lies
can mask the present sovereignty of truth?
What does it take to notice
how, in transformation, nothing changes?
how, rather, it’s a shift in focus that reveals
what always has been real
and always here.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 12, 2020
I will walk with you
in the trust that can’t be broken,
with faith in the elemental
nature of our being
You may ask, why are we here?
But in that question are assumptions
about both we and here –
Step behind those
and find the answer,
not defined in the channel
down which, river-like,
we tumble and cascade,
but in the source,
unfailing, pure, and infinite,
that sends us out,
that pours us forth.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 11, 2020
At the clean place
where we are all formed,
(not by history
or the ruts imposed on us)
Not formed by degradation or erosion,
but by the acclamation of our presence,
our hope, our love, our holding fast to life
In the moment we are formed,
not in the past sometime,
but here and now,
We can feel the pure Spirit that impels us –
our breath, our days, our joy,
steady fountain of our timeless being.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 9, 2020
I couldn’t find a poem tonight –
couldn’t find it in the last glow
of daisies against the twilight,
or in the last spark of the fireplace coals,
couldn’t find it despite all the magical manifestations
of light – trees bathed in sunlight, dark clouds behind,
sun shining through rain, how clouds
nestled in distant valleys
held light longer than the hills
I couldn’t find it, maybe because
I was looking for something important,
forgetting that everything is.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 7, 2020
Well I suppose it’s a good thing
not to have outgrown the little happys –
pleasure that comes from things people say –
their kindness and appreciation
And while it’s good to cultivate enduring joy
that burns and burbles unconditional,
that flows up into places that need relief from pain,
that offers hope and comfort where it finds itself
It also doesn’t hurt
to get a message or a package
that someone took the time to send,
that someone thought of first
It’s good to be lit up by someone’s efforts
and that my little happy please them too.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 6, 2020
Take a periwinkle crayon,
follow it down the whorl of memory
to the shiver of feeling it evoked –
not the easy love of magenta and blue-green,
but a tremulous liking,
flavor and texture
with a sliver of tears, perhaps,
a taste to grow into
Remember magenta berries,
the juicy ones with the pithy crunch
and the flavor unlike most anything –
a little sweet, a little floral,
which we ate, not knowing their name
or if they were edible,
along the high hedged path to Whitney’s house
Consider sisterhood –
its bittersweet, its viney tendrils,
multicolored and intimate,
a tie to grow into.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 4, 2020
Trying on the admission
that I am the one –
I am the one who needs to understand,
I am the one called
to make radical transformation
in my own mind,
to have my whole sense of being
reframed – to find my context
was much too small
I am the one who needs to change,
I am the one who needs to act,
I am the one who needs to listen,
listen to I Am,
listen to the One.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 3, 2020
My challenge: to not be polarized,
my challenge – to not be right.
However easy it may seem,
how smooth the path along that route,
it never has delivered me
to the new place, the place
I long to go
My challenge: not to polarize.
So vastly better to be silent
than speak the worn out words
defining tribe
Mine is not a happy tribe to have come from –
the tribe of right (more oily and insidious
than the tribe of white,
which I may righteously deplore)
My task – dip seven times in Jordan,
learn the river’s lessons,
come out clean.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 2, 2020
Stand for truth.
A partial truth will not save us –
partial truth is another term
for untruth
Yet we come with these fragments,
don’t know the whole story
(trained all our lives in our blindnesses
so we can’t see them)
We will be fragmented
until we insist on oneness,
which will feel at times
like tearing ourselves apart
so we can let partitions be deconstructed
so we can’t cordon ourselves off
from the darkness
So we can stand
and let the light
shine through everything,
washing us clean,
showing the whole truth
and setting things right.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 1, 2020
