The Reach

Hand over hand

a dirt stained body rises.

Hand over hand

clinging to the coarse woven fibers;

Skin burning with every red inch.

Moment by moment giving up

and holding on.

Hand over hand, rising above the canopy.

inch by inch into daylight;
The breath a chant, a prayer and plea.

The expansive sky in defiance

of everything once believed to be closed.

Terns drift by on their long migration.
To the endless world, the climber offers a small cry

merging in a wild chorus with every pitch.

Surge

When you can no longer recognize the sound of your own dissonance

Forget not
your strength has already been ground-truthed.

Engraved in your body are the coordinates
Of a basalt bedrock that is deeper than the waves of change,
Steadier than despair.

Courage is to live what is;

To look the truth in the face without blinking.
A place pretense cannot abide,
Where ugliness reveals itself to have been God all along.

To stand amid the fearsome water rushing wildly where it will,
Dislodging riprap from the banks
And carving a new way,
Moving ever on in infinite power.

with boundless love

What if it was your child,
                                       Don't say it
being pulled from the rubble?

I don't want to feel it.

What if it was your mother
bleeding from her ears?
Could you hand her over to spend her final days in quarantine?

Cover your ears, close your heart, run from the words.

But how can the world heal
if we don't let the pain in?

Scream the pain out.

And how can we weigh a life-
what is the exchange rate
of a Liberian to a Palestinian or Iraqi or Honduran child
to an unarmed black American teenager,
to a beloved celebrity?

Stop
running
from your beautiful, living compassion.

We're all in this together.

Compassion emboldens us and gives us the courage to cross into war torn cities, to offer kindness to the suffering, to sacrifice, to speak out at great risk.

We must be the voice for the voiceless.

Our weapons will be our compassion
and insight.

If you are afraid of the pain, hold on to me.
We will not break apart.

Beneath the apathy is immense power.

With boundless love, we will work
to dismantle arsenals of hatred and indifference.

May we be a refuge to everything that lives.

To sit

To find a quiet spot to sit and watch

how the bumblebee lands so gently on the flower petal, how the petal lightly bends under the weight and curls around the soft body until it turns and is gone.

See how the sparrow turns its head a dozen times to be sure it is safe before its beak disappears into the warm ground and surfaces with a worm, so clever to have known all along what was there.

And my clumsy hand can hardly pull a weed without snapping the stem of the flower I wish to save, and cursing. What the animals must think of my gracelessness, my noisy oblivion.  

Perhaps they think nothing of it, only wait for the nuisance to pass; while I spy on them (not undetected) with rapturous curiosity.

Saturn

Who are you in the dark-

where no one can see the days that brought you to this moment

or the moments enshrined in the quiet inner room of your heart

that once created a sea change.

Who are you when the quiet is broken only by the rhythmic breath of your sleeping child

and you must face how stupid it is to have believed your ego, that trickster

that anything matters but an open heart.

In the darkness you make a promise;

Cherish those that are dear

and let the others believe what they want.

The fear that keeps you awake deep into the night

is a lie.

In the darkness you resolve

to let it all fall

to save what burns in you.

chaos, refuge

My stories have dried up
as all things must
to be scattered, untraceable, from their source.

Let them be.

With them go the details of my life
that when called upon are reformed and reinterpreted.
What was will always be obscured by what is.
The past is not alive- it cannot be revived with breath or the desperate
heart compressions.
We search our memory for the lines of the dearest face,
the exact tone of the voice we will never again hear.

We cannot keep anything we love. But as long as we are here,
we break our bread and share our beds, we give broth
and nurse one another through sickness, and we hope for more time.
This is all we have, and it is never enough.

There was a time when I was moved by tragic love,
but I have had my fill of tragedy. What is truly precious
is the love that rebuilds after tragedy, setting the cairn over ruins.

Chaos has been our mother, and we have been given that which is too precious to willingly pass on. “To let the mortal world be enough"- a challenge we each must each stare bewildered in the eyes.

I am here and I have so much to give. May we be a refuge
to everything that lives.

slippery fish

Life, what are you?   You are a strange bird indeed; a slippery fish.  Sometimes you are an unruly great-aunt, wielding chaos in your elegant sleeve.  You are love so entangled with fear that I cannot pull the two apart. And something I cannot name- the eternally impermanent paradox; indiscriminately beautiful everywhere, tight lipped as a martyr.