I followed the trail of words
back through my days,
looking for the consolation
and the brave face
that marked the chasm that I never spoke of,
but it was gone
How can it be that a whole memory
is erased? Not exactly that,
for the facts are there,
but the pit of emotion is gone,
and the weight, the despair
In the place of dragons, where each lay,
will be grass with reeds and rushes
Even so. Hope springs from ash,
green and thriving.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 4, 2023
I can remember lakes of kindness
and jumping into them,
and the light that powers smiles
soaking in, and filling up, flooding me
with an abiding wellbeing
Some I could return to often,
some were more like puddles
but were enough to light me up
There were dry patches, too.
I could go for long times in between ablutions,
sustaining as they were,
and because I still could access them in memory
But the richest thing is when
I can create a lake for others –
when I do that, I never lack.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 5, 2022
We move in and out of noticing
while the elements of the day
move from grace to grace,
sun touched trees suddenly
dripping in beauty, flocks of birds
landing and flying, singing and calling,
frogs incongruous as January spring
In and out of dream, emotion, memory,
we move in waves – our day is braided
with these and what we observe –
sometimes they blot each other out
but sometimes they swell together,
their chorus sending us over some edge
where we float like a feather on flood tide.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 8, 2022
I find myself thinking of you,
spending my day wrapped in memory –
so many lenses to use
Each lens makes it different,
shades of the moods and the color
calling forth different scenes
All of these memories
still would be mine
no matter how things had come out
How I would view them
had things come out otherwise
isn’t a thing I could know
But the way that I knew you
shines clear, steps out strong,
leaves my clouded perceptions behind
How I knew you true then
is how I know you now, –
friend of my heart and my mind.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 11, 2020
Though you may fall and fall
through the bars of memory,
hitting at moments, going back and down
Though you may feel
striped beyond redemption,
branded by the light and dark,
strobed to instability
You cannot fail.
This is not about you —
it’s about your Maker,
and your Maker knows you whole.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 31, 2018
I hear, in the echo of distant crow caws,
a time link, a lacuna
that takes me quickly back east
to early summer mornings,
my vision now split
in the double exposure
so often engendered
when twilight comes late
and dream drifts
could call it morning
till I come back, startled,
to here and now,
watching my perceptions
settle like fallen petals.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 17, 2017
The box labeled
parental sentimentalities
is small
and the things in it
were not carefully vetted
They were just what got caught
at moments when the momentum
of moving on
flagged a little
and these were dropped like sediment
from the slower flow
Or when a stick snags something
near the river’s bank
and other things, arrested, gather behind it
Somehow I couldn’t throw out
the paper cut out figure smiling benignly,
curling at the edges
or the fimo depiction
of a sink with snow in it
Many years hence
I may look at them again.
For now, this box is ark
among the flags.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 21, 2017
In the moments before waking
I find myself walking through veils
searching for treasures,
collecting them like strands of light,
curling them around my consciousness
to hold on to them
as I transition into day
I choose them for their cuddly warmth
and how they glow like hope,
how they make me feel: this
is what I live for —
all the good in life
for me to learn to bring forth
throughout my hours awake.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 22, 2016
The old man has been drifting in time a lot, today.
“I want to thank you for inviting me down to visit you,” he says.
I say, yes, it’s been a good fourteen years.
And in the yellow living room
I feel those years in colored layers,
the golden joys, their complicated weavings
with things I was regretting then
and things I would regret later,
the efforts of my striving
for things that had great merit
and others that, perhaps, were ill advised
The times of clearing
where previous intentions
washed like watercolors
into pools of indistinct brightness,
with lines I sketched on them
and called learning
The fleeting pride, the taut hopes,
some realized, some still waiting,
buried under years
of leaf fall, winters, springs
Yes, it’s been a good fourteen years,
bright and dark, and rich in all I can imagine.
And the goodness will continue,
each unfinished thing, in its time, redeemed,
all the blessings brought to full view.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 28, 2016
