When I try and get away….
it’s so much better if I just leap
from the frying pan
right into the fire.
Frying pans are flat, one dimensional
whereas fire is not under my control, like love.
It’s an alchemy,
pain is the catalyst,
the necessary spark
and the fire is a leap, a trust, a let go
beyond understanding
the realm of the heart
thoughts hinder.
Fire burns
what remains is ash
or is it gold?
Or both?
I am inaugurated
I am present- ent
And whether I live or die
I am the underlying wholeness.
Hafiz says this….
Just sit there right now.
Don’t do a thing.
Just see.
For your separation from God
Is the hardest work in this world.
Let me bring you trays of food
And something
That you like to drink.
You can use my soft words
As a cushion
For your
Head.
We can not heal
what we can not acknowledge.
In the economy of grace,
as offered in Desmond Tutu’s,
South African,
Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
where all had to take proper
and public responsibility
for their mistakes,
not for the sake of punishment
but for the sake of truth and healing.
Radicle grace is being loved
in spite of ourselves
in the very places
where we cannot or will not love ourselves.
We are a crazy weave with the essential “other”
Our mutual apology, healing and forgiveness
offers a sustainable future for humanity.
Otherwise we are controlled by the past,
individually and corporately.
The unbound ones
are best prepared to unbind others.
So unburden your heart with a friend
if you need to be restored to your true nature
which is love!
My mother subscribed to Vogue
and I buy it for my daughter, Willow
Their sense of fashion
skipped a generation when it came to me.
I got into ripped jeans during protests in college
and never got out of them.
But just look at this fine woman leader
on the cover of Vogue.
Tennis shoes and pink satin.
She’s game
Game on!
It makes you weak in the knees
and proud as a peacock.
Here we go!
Having lost the charts of the rugged coast
this bold lack of navigation
now has us fully lost.
What returns at this late hour
is a song we sang in our youth
on the bow of the Amorita.
It’s a sailors lament
about running out of whiskey.
“And I scarcely think that I’ll get a drink till I get to Buffalo”
Between then and now
who can really say what happened.
A life is so big.
She’s ok where she is
tucked into a hospital bed
foggy with not knowing.
She’d like to lay low
and just let the hull rust.
But we, her family,
screech like gulls
shouting Up, Get Up
We want another day.
I’ll do me
and you do you
and together
we will create
wants needed
for the whole of life
to thrive!
Jan3, 2021 Love Sally
I called my sister today.
She’s been in a nursing home
over the holidays.
I have not been sleeping well.
When she answers the phone
I rest back in my chair
it’s the soft tone of her voice, an instant pleasure,
my first love, my beloved.
I am myself because of you.
Love a small boat, it leaks and has seen better days
It’s a tenuous sistuation
we tip with the slightest movement.
But even if we fall out
cast into the cold water
I will reach for your hand
and I will find it.
You wanted to tell me something funny,
“They have a all purpose soap, you said
and I washed my hair with it today,
and when I looked in the mirror
my hair lay limp and thin and flat to my face
I looked twenty years older, I looked like mom
I looked just like Annie, remember her hair?
I laughed so completely and we had ourselves a bit of fun.
Our time has run out
no more sand in the upside down clock.
Mother Earth is calling to you
where your no longer warm body
will rest.
Her timing is impeccable,
neither of us could continue.
Me cleaning up after you
and you so very ill.
Our final act of love
is being with each other at the end.
So brave So true So impossible!
My brother and I
are from a long line of burglars.
It’s an unconscious profession,
an undisclosed mythos
a trade passed down by generations.
If we could just admit the truth
( our love of thievery)
my brother steals from me
and I steal from him.
This acceptance is Love
freed from it’s box,
the horded treasure
can return to source.
The End!
I am water,
only because you are the ocean.
We are here
only because old leaves have been falling.
A mutching of memories folding
into buried hands.
The cliffs we learn to edge
The tree truck hollowed, humming.
I am a tongue
only because you are the body
planting stories with thumb.
Soil clings to your knees
Small stacks of empty clay pots dreaming.
I am the milky fish eye, only
because it’s your favorite.
A slipper is lost in the yard.
A haku lei is chilling in the icebox.
I am a cup of feathers,only
because you want to fill the hours.
I am a turning wrist, only
because you left the hose on.
Heliconias are singing underwater
Beetles are floating across the yard.
(A poem by Donovan Kuhio Colleps
Entitled Kissing the Opelu.)
I am in so many spirit walks
that I’ve lost track of them all….
walking with my sister whose been looking at the other side
walking with a new baby coming in and her wild journey to get here.
Walking with my brother’s move to Hawaii.
It’s too far away to suit me
but then he is always in the “dog house”
(according to me.)
Walking with myself and my inability to change.
Feeling the sweetness of love
coming from the beyond
where my sister and my mother and my father are
my grandmother too.
This place is a spirit walk.
