Passage

            “who will weave a nest for all the birds of passage?”
                        Dilruba Amedq, “Bring Now the Angels”
 
Vultures, blackly elegant, glide across the lake,
making their way home along alleys of cloud.
We swivel below, craning to see their loose ranks pass over.
So many!
Where have they come from
in the far trees, the dark beyond the water?
where are they headed?
 
And do they leave us soon?
Is that why they have gathered in their great flock
finding each other for comfort in a long journey?
 
We see the birds above us, starting
south or deep, or simply fading,
the air holding their imprint for a while.
A day or so ago we watched a skein of white
a V that unraveled and re-formed
against the pale, blue-white of sky,
the rubbed stain of cloud.
We stilled to watch them as they passed.
 
Leaving, so many are leaving,
the warmth and movement of their mutual bodies
holding them aloft, giving them strength:
pines drying on mountain slopes, long
ranks turning red and then gray,
teeming water turned turbid and still
and schools of silver fled out in currents
that lead them who knows where.
It is said the skies of the continent
filled and darkened with the passage of birds,
the ground shook with running hooves.
Where are they going, our great ones,
our innocents?
 
A bird hops over the flagstones outside my screen door,
his tail perked high.
Will you go too, little one?
And can you ever return? 

—Sarah Webb

The Dream

                           
We tuck our dreams into broken
walls. Each seeds a prayer, sprouts like
a moonbeam, vining toward outposts
for the living.
 
Bring the healer, the howler, the
listening ear, to break the spell
keeping us here, wreckage on
the path to hell.
 
Weave a nest spinning gold
for all the birds of passage.
The shuttle waits to bear us away from
the pain of disdain, and sword-eaters
who swallow fire, show us a new flame.
 
We test our pulse as we sleep.
Dreams bring divine messengers
who summon the grace needed to
transform those buried, burnt,
tied to stones, to be bound
hence forth by love alone.
 
No longer slaves, we embark
beyond this grave where hatred,
fear & lies held sway.
We rise, rise & sing, joyously sing,
wisely, remembering everything.

—Martha Koock Ward

Angels Among Us

Angels on this earth
   We wish to see.
Angels all, we yearn to be.
And when we look
  Both near and far,
We find that some
  Already are.

—Paul Causey

Did the Angels Ever Come?

When all is said and done
   Who will be left standing?
When the sun sets for the last time on humanity,
   Who will grieve for our loss?
Who will be left to tell our story?
   And will the angels remember what we've done?

—Paul Causey

My Butterfly Song

My world began inside an egg.
I was growing and changing.
Sometimes I had to struggle to adapt
to my changing size and shape, my wants and needs.
The changes seemed natural.
Some happened outside of my control.
Limitations of money, of location, of mobility, of age,
could all be overcome or shape my adaptations.
I slumbered, nourished and protected.

When I entered the world of the caterpillar everything changed.
I had changed.
Now danger and death had become part of my world.
There was no way to go back to sleep again
and expect to wake up where I was before.
There was no “do over.”
My responsibilities were to survive and manage
the changing challenges of each new day.
To meet each new revelation:
inequality, systemic racism, selfishness, corruption.
I have no map or time table for my journey.
My brain and my body must find my path;
I am in survival mode.

Who could have imagined this new life?
Who could have prepared us?
We need a whole new set of skills as we adapt.
Reading and listening,
Now must include finding and evaluating the sources of information.
Mathematics
Now must include evaluating how the numbers are being manipulated
to spin the conclusions.
History
Now must include recognizing “the facts” which are included and excluded...
Social Studies
Now must include an understanding of the assumptions
about people, justice, freedom and happiness
on which they are based.
The Arts
Now must have a valued role in everyday life.
I approach this new feast as a guest.
I will be moderate and grateful
as I visit each flower
trying out my new wings.

—Laura A. Smith

Dancer

—Kim Mosley

Pulse 

The pulsing sounds of color

reverberate 

in kaleidoscopic bits 

that scatter in 

pieces of beat, 

strands of band, 

shards of bard, 

high vibes, 

low tones, 

that burst onto 

the scene in shouting 

shades of boom, 

a syncopated wheel 

of reeling shapes, 

radiant madcap whirls— 

a world unto itself, 

a sounding board 

for a vibrant 

dervish 

that dances 

and dreams

in living color. 

—Marilyn Duncan 

ODD Monday Prompt Poem 

9-7-20

+++++

I kicked up a storm of leaves

indigo, black, orange—green.

The wind whirled and swirled

clothing me in their disarray, until

I was literally swept away on

a gust and a Go! that gustled me

here in to this rather cramped

glass globe.

It can’t be a snowball, the colors

aren’t right. I pray no more shake

ups—until I can get my head on

tight. How will I appease the god

of leaves, gain freedom, or is this

just a real wacky dream? Images

of me lined on black flying squares.

Jeez, I’m neither here nor all there.

I am down in the dumps these Covid

nights, I toss and turn, as REMs

flicker faster, and give me a fright.

Perhaps it’s that egg salad I ate or was

it potato, tossing my tummy at my mind’s

gate? What’s to become of all these pieces

of me? O, sweet Morning, break open

this dream! Release me to whatever

the “real world” seems. 

—Martha Ward

Kim’s ODD Prompt 9.7.20

+++++

Dancer

At the center a figure 

dances. Around him the 

bubble of the world spins.

Fragments float and fall,

reflections and objects:

gate, lightbulb, plant and bird.

A foot raises, a mouth gapes.

Cornets and lines of crops

moon launches and petroglyphs.

Dancing the world into being, dancing 

the end.  Continuous beginning 

out of continuous decay.

Exhausting, exhilarating, 

exhausting, creating order

out of a chaos of sticks and gravel.

Juggler, the man keeps the world 

in the air, will not let it crash

will not let it sling into chaos.

The mind tires, the body falters.

Who can keep a world alive,

keep a world from breaking?

What man can do it?

Dancers stumble and lose hold.

Their mouths go slack.

Turn then to the one inside the man 

who speaks from the dancer

through a hidden ordering

who shapes his dance

—Sarah Webb, 9/7/20

+++++

The boy faces west. Or south.

Or left. Kicking about in his

unconscious orb. His friends

cavort around him while

leaf fragments of September

source sun prisms, jewel

pigments for a bluegreenred

home. Music is in him. Dance

surrounds him. Sound escapes

into the ether. Now the boy

gallops through his egg-shaped

world. Do his friends run with

him? Are they imaginary mates

or figments of his own story, his

own magical mind? Here…a

toast, Skole, Cin-Cin, Bottoms

Up….to all the dancing boys.

May they never grow into the

men who lose their song, their

dance and their vibrant, 

secret sphere.

—Beverly Voss

09-07-20

Moth poems

H.E.R.O.N

 Today I swam, silent, behind my daughter

through cool water, the wind a touch,

riding low waves, green and silver,

following the signs she is teaching me

in my new deafness:  H.e.r.o.n.  D.o.c.k.  Come.

 

Her head bobbed, a dark seal, past Jean's dock

and submerged rocks, out onto the open lake

and the rougher waters of the drowned river channel,

Tim's pier then and the neighbors' past, and there, See.

A gray shape under the silver Xs of the pipes,

stilt-legged, slow. The heron.

 

And my daughter tracking him.

She turned to point and I bobbed my fist to say, Yes.

Yes, I see him. Yes, I see you. You have led me to a good place.

 

She raised her camera in its pouch,

head and camera blending in the bright of the water.

He stepped along the shore, and she followed.

Brown against brown, I saw her take her shot,

shadow stepping into light, the jab for fish,

then, tall against blue and cloud, head lifted,

iconic bird of water and rock and sky.

 

Heron and girl fixed in my gaze.

I saw her glide to the bird through the silver, close,

so close she looked up to see him and I marveled he did not take flight.

And I took my own picture, having no instrument but my heart

to say, Look and remember: here is the one I have loved in this life

learning to see, learning to live. 

—Sarah Webb

—Heron by Amanda Webb

Pondering plant viruses and self-knowledge

Stretching myself, scapula peeled back like the sky:

Knowing and not knowing, so not writing down

the nascent, subsoil milky specks at night

(and more twinkle out if you look longer).

To calm the rods in the eyes of the dandelions,

this I have learned by eating all the UV rays

and casting skin of my poems,

hiding convex in

curled-toe honeydews,

whether parasamgate pairs

     of aphids

     are to be spoken, their

velvet skin, the most unnatural neons, seeming like

garbhas of seaweed

and barnacled pupils lapping

     without dimension…

Is this what is to be learned?

Is this all that I have learned

in the past murky warp of a year?

      that I am too surrealistically snotty

and too wildly naturalistic to enjoy Hart Crane and T.S. Eliot anymore?

too obsessed with Taoist and Zen hermits to enjoy Shakespeare anymore?

      or is the real lesson the unwhispered waters of wonder,

that the sweetgum glow hazel

     in August on earth pure lands

with or without ontology,

     their seeds home to unimaginable Buddha lands,

capillaries pressed out

     in unpunctured volcanic dicots

returned to the unchanging inner monocot—

I’ve learned I’m too skiddish to be a contemplative for now,

my last name is Jennings, not Merton,

and maybe that’s a ton better for me,

nothingness being flowers, la mer, and nothingness—

inside the dead ladybug on my windowsill,

clouds beckon unswept revelations…

—Tom Jennings

The day I learned what “Sow” meant

 The day I learned what “Sow” meant 

After “Saint Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell

Sow sat, ‘neath ferny vernal waterfall,

      sewing seeds of dispassioned 

compassionate awakening,

     the True Sow of No Title—

      hooves rooting and melting

into stationary sewn soil,

     its own clover solar flare,

chanting the nameless

     sewn threads of the

     thatchy tails of trees

     above, 

with milken dreamy love—

      In the modal darkness of dusky

tree bark, Sow sees the

      millipedal centipedes

nesting in unimpeded emptiness,

     sewing their own selfless blessings,--

        kissing the 

        violet waters of age—

Sow sees loamy mud, each divot

      a pew for mildew’s salvation,

tails of time tracked and milled by other

peregrine-sows,

pebbles in the mud

      blebbing stupas and surging granulites

rounding to starbathed coil

      of the sun’s ray-seeds

and the egg-seeds of beached

saintly horseshoe crabs on 

the innate shore of Sow,

bleached in Sow’s

     resoundingly silent stillness—

Sow, whose stomach acid

      is sulfurously placidly absolving,

wouldn’t even dissolve bone, fanning own

      borne molecules in liquid cremation

but nurture them into needlepoint-glowing

firefly bacterioles and 

       throw them back out, to love

into neatly monasteries of pig-pillow algae,

      hooved with the stardust

      of countless galaxies of

      Franciscan birds, opening their membranes to all,

         crying 

         and

         wanting nothing.

—Tom Jennings

“Essence” is a Phony Word

 Bodhisattvas in empty earth

       but never really—up past wormy holy

underworld—to mind without walls

       innate in

empty eggshell

      already hatched

and having nothing,

       solar cumulus columnar, wordlessness,

    immanence

of speechless symphonic grasses,

    their aquaporins precisely 

        minute:

    voidfabric, whole waterfall canyons

of watery veins

         ambivalent of apical self-natures

or idea outside of valent electrons

         pulsing the stillness of

froggy hollow waters, sky delicately wrapped

in the gaps of cells

        and so vesicles veritably gloved suchly,

a voyagerless return—

the drunken idiotboat

with harpsichord of splinters

lapping tongues underneath the

other shore—

and salamander sidles up to frog

in the hills of unchanging 

         untreaded tadpole evolutions and asks:

“why did the dinosaurs come from 

           the pangea west?”  and frog says:

“I will tell you”

           and before frog can say a word

           frog is eaten by swallowbird

and the eye of unfathomed essence

is consummated and 

        frog reappears—

and bodhisattva’s flowers are resplendored

and get stepped on by accident,

the sky still pervading everything,

clouds pointing at your own head

and the head of the knobby rhythmic 

knees of herons with tapestries

of lulling pine-smell forest history

within them, forgotten and unrealized,

taped with words and

extinguished by extant is-ness

      and its soft

unblown

     breath

—Tom Jennings

Dish

 

—Kim Mosley

Porous Line

Waiting at the

porous line

twixt night & day,

Silence

embraces me

with the ease

of a lover,

whispering

sweet truth,

“Enough, enough.”

I surrender, willing

to be satisfied.

—Martha Koock Ward

When I Rise

When I rise in the morning

the world is dark.

I fall, seeing the darkness,

thinking dark is the day.

When light edges in timid

in mist in the east

I fall timid to meet the day.

I fall timid, reaching for this to do

thinking, oh no, avoid, refrain--

do and refrain, gain this, lose that.

I fall into dark before the day rises

fall into the small confine of my body

and the day not begun.

When I rise in the morning

the floor cold on my feet

water cold in my mouth

and my mind still caught in the cool of dream

and the day glimmers through the blinds,

I turn from the room where I cannot see,

to the day that is turning to morning

to a junco on the wire of the feeder

to steam from the kettle under the stove lamp

and I do not say, this is what to do

this what I expect, what I expect of you.

Then the day rises with me and around me

and the sun appears over the hill.

—Sarah Webb