Author: heather

Travel or don’t,

listen or speak,

learn or teach,

journey out or in,

no problem

 

just taste the wind

to discover whether you

are finding or seeking

 

the seeking can raise your head

so that you stumble

 

and uncovering

is everywhere.

Actually I am a poet

right now

in this scratching of pen,

a quiet house

warming itself against outside cold.

 

I thought I needed more,

some eyes to read these words

or ears to hear them

or plotting how to share.

 

But the mime

who performs in her home

instead of on the street

is still a mime,

 

the painter who murals

private walls,

 

the potter who mixes personal mud

for her own stoked kiln,

 

this intimate kundalini.

 

I was seventeen

and fearful in my body,

awkward and stiff

in that latina dance class,

pale fish out of water.

 

And she looked like a gargoyle

come to life,

a fat wild girl

with a lazy eye,

a nightmare gypsy

who also did not fit

the tidy room.

 

But when she danced

time shifted,

her weight ballooning

into grace,

her passion streaming

to make ugly

something coveted,

a freedom cavorting,

daring us to drop

into truth,

to whirl in something larger.

Your gift,

a spark that wants to flame,

creates in me desire

to craft, to mould and shape

with care,

to formulate and manifest

bright unexpected rainbows.

 

Unseen colour swirls,

untasted flavours tingle,

and duty throbs like craving

with dignity

as if a new paintbox waits

right at the height of my reaching,

brushtip poised.

 

And cool spray on joy

draws my eye back to page,

the white waiting,

a necessary empty,

a true shroud

into which I sink enfolded,

soliloquy of silence,

no paintbrush,

tender canvas.

It must be love,

this friendship with knots untying

over distance,

untouched time

making room for holding space

where compost settles.

 

Fermenting waste,

decay has its own perfume

and some of it is sweet.

 

And sure, there is a story

about new green,

bright tendrils rising;

but none is here,

no seeds,

soil that is.

 

This is not tragedy,

not melancholic groan,

simply turning over

what has fallen

to help with ripening.

 

There is a love here

deeper than forgiveness,

softer than arms outstretched,

a waiting beyond ticking,

flowering in reverse.

 

Sacrifice and renunciation

arrived as two teachers

speaking in the evening

and waking me in the night

with a blank slate wiped briefly.

 

Listening to them too early

is a fierce denial

of blood and flesh and chlorophyll,

responding to demands

that are heard as a promise of power,

a reaper’s scythe applied before harvest,

slicing where no grain is grown.

 

These tools are sharp

and will cut away

illusion, projection, comfort, vice,

a pyre of all we know

ignited, smoking, lost.

 

And me learning about everyday myth

on the edge of sleep

where my body is pressed by sensation

that lives only in my mind,

knowing samsara is like this,

everywhere not real.

 

Yet what I also know

from this place in my waking

is that true sacrifice

means agonies of attachment,

deep compelling bonds of love

that have substance,

sons on altars with fathers in tears.

There is no cool ease here,

no shrugging off the world

in preference to space

… oh, maybe for a season,

but beauty will find you

and grasp you by the throat

so that you taste each ripe fruit

and gasp with the bright pain of love

and have no mask left

for hiding your laughter at nature’s caress.

 

And that is the season

for learning to work with the scythe,

when all you love

needs harvesting,

not for storage

but so the field can be readied

for new planting.

 

This cutting away

is painful,

it is not for the weak

as the scythe takes a practiced body

and precise mind.

 

There is a fierce energy

that wants to blow away illusion

so we live on the stark slab

with no ties.

 

Like inhale and exhale,

Gaia knows we cannot raze ourselves to rock

only,

knows we are this fragile web

of intertwinings co-breathing,

knows that rock slabs in vacuum

have no life.

 

And so renunciation

means seeing the illusion

in all that we love,

seeing how this real child is truly loved

and freely given,

seeing how this real small self

is precious and still just pretend,

a temporary binding of cells,

a process of sandcastle and shoreline.

A closing the door

on some pleasures

to make space for other knowing.

A grieving of losses,

a black slate wiped briefly

with real tears.

Endings

come after

and before

and after

and then there is the space

beside the hospital bed

between them.

 

And in this space

there are words, and none,

places of soft longing

and no safety

and remembering sweetness.

 

So I frame my mouth

into a circle

to send you a puff of breath

across the miles;

if the candle flickers

you will know that it was me

reminding you of your light,

the way you help others

sink bravely into their fear

so it can warm them.

Like dolphins nudging

injured swimmers

I feel all the ways

I have been floated into safety,

moved by others’ buoyancy

into new harbours.

 

No heroic intervention,

instinctive caring

rises out of play and daily hunt,

welcoming whatever visits

no matter how it arrives.

 

Let my healing

bring new grace and companions,

moving without a trainer’s dangle

or dependence on regular fish,

a swimmer’s generosity

in trusting ocean.

 

Unlike the rescuers

with ready alarms,

let me move immersed

until the cries find me,

play freely

until I am called

to swim alongside.