years before the fire
the match in your thoughts—
what isn’t tinder
Posts Tagged ‘inspiration’
One Not Quite Accident
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fire, inspiration, poem, poetry on September 5, 2016| 1 Comment »
Transfer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, inspiration, poem, poetry, Telluride Arts on June 27, 2016| 1 Comment »
And if you are lucky, you might stand
in the place where the horses were loaded
before they were led to look for gold, for silver.
There are journeys you, too, wish to take,
though you know now that the journeys
you long for the most are often made
by pledging yourself to a place.
The old stone walls were built with flow in mind.
Even now, they keep nothing out—not the sunlight,
not the wind, not the curve of your imagination.
And every window is an invitation
to see the same beauty framed a new way.
What might be possible here? No way to pretend
to predict the infinite. Still, this chance
to show up, to serve our own passion
in a toast to potential, and to be humbled
by our own hearts so eager to be opened.
How to Find Some Poetry in Your Life?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged find the poetry in your life, inspiration, Mesa County Public Library, poetry, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer on October 2, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Join me in Grand Junction at the library this coming Monday, at 6 p.m. for a conversation/reading/presentation as part of their ongoing “Inspiring Presentations” series. Free!
Not Only on the Fourth of July
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged firework, inspiration, poem, poetry on July 4, 2015| 4 Comments »
not once
has a firework apologized
for being so bright—
like that, I think,
live like that
No Strings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged inspiration, path, poem, poetry, road on June 23, 2015| 1 Comment »
Here, we might say, here is where
a road should be. But road there is none.
Isn’t that like us, thinking we know
the world better than the world itself.
There isn’t a road. That is clear.
And we want one. That’s clear, too.
And we don’t like the fact
there is no visible road.
Whether our intention is to run away
or to move closer to,
well, that changes, doesn’t it.
And isn’t it just like us to think
we need a road. Instead,
there is this change of light,
this scent of rain. There is
nothing we might call a path,
but there is this urge
to begin to move, this desire
that causes the legs to lift,
again and again and again,
less as if we are marionettes,
more as if there is some inner drive
more real than even the real world,
and it helps us step one more step,
one more step toward what we do not know.
Happening on the Kolb Studio While Walking the South Rim
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grand canyon, inspiration, Kolb Brothers, poem, poetry on June 11, 2015| 3 Comments »
Wearing their life vests made of cork
the Kolb brothers rowed their canvas boat
down the Colorado River.
I watched them on scratchy black and white film.
It was different then—no dams,
no crowds—only no different.
Humpback chub and pinyon jay,
mule deer and cliff rose,
ponderosa pine, white roar
of the rapids and two billion years
of geologic record.
Revelation must be passed through
with the whole body,
though the brothers were not looking
for revelation. They were looking for,
well, only they can say, and they are gone.
I did not intend to travel to their home
at the edge of the cliff,
but when I found their legend,
I felt an uplift, a collision, a drifting apart.
Is that, too, what revelation is? I swallowed
their story as if it might carve me,
undermine any harder layers
so they might collapse,
might erode me into whatever
is essential, a woman who longs
to launch herself into the flow,
no matter how flimsy
her protection, no matter
how loud, how unruly it is.
Despite all the Right Conditions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, inspiration, poem, poetry, writer's block on June 16, 2013| 4 Comments »
Some days we can’t find
the poem, at least not
the one we want to write,
the one about purple wisteria,
for instance, or the one
in which the raven appears
a sign that magic is present. Instead
the poem waits to be found
on the back of a paint sample card
or it’s cracked inside a blue glass ball.
You can glimpse it, there!
and it’s beautiful, dewy, but when
you find the pen, the poem
is as missing as the tin man’s heart.
Each time you get close,
it dives into the swimming pool,
though there is no diving allowed.
It tells you there is no happy hour
on Saturdays. It invites you to a dance party,
only you don’t have a car and it is much
too far away to walk.
For a moment, the poem was
a red tailed hawk, but the circles
it made were too high to read.
For a moment, the poem
pulled like turquoise wool
through your fingers, but then
every turquoise stitch you knit
uncounted itself and unraveled.
It is hard not to think it’s something
you’ve done. It is hard not to think
you’ve let yourself down, or even worse,
that you’ve let down the poem.
I’m here, you say, to the air, to the hawk,
to the purple wisteria blooms.
I’m here, you say to the raven, the road runner,
the blue, blue glass of the blue glass ball.
But you’re too in the way, and the more you try
the more it’s like trying to catch a cat that knows
you want to clip its claws.
And the poem slips out of the dragonfly wings
you found on the path this morning,
and it steals the silver from the nightshade leaves
beside the Rio Grande, and it walks out of the room without you.
Even it doesn’t know where it is going.
Example Haiku
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chickadee, haiku, inspiration, song on January 25, 2013| 3 Comments »
flat gray sky
the chickadee sings
no less brightly
The Second Law of Thermodynamics Gives a Pep Talk
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 84, hope, inspiration, light, poems, poetry, radiance, thermodynamics on March 3, 2012| 1 Comment »
Even the tiniest
coldest
most distant
atoms
in the universe
release
light
my dear one
it is not
so dark
*
*
This is the first in a series of 84-character poems on radiance, one of the 11 powers of the universe that Brian Swimme outlines in EnlightenNext. He writes, “In my view, the power of radiance is an expression of the mysterious way in which the universe cannot contain the magnificence it houses. Instead, it is compelled to express itself in ten million different ways.”
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