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Posts Tagged ‘weather’

On Her Birthday, a Thank You Letter to Emily Dickinson

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 11, 2025| 9 Comments »


Dec. 10, 1830-May 15, 1886
 
 
Dear Emily, your words expressed
the weather of the soul—
the hailstorm no less right than sun—
the heart has room for all—
 
you understood how anguish
is what opens best the heart—
the sadder our circumstance,
the more we speak with stars.
 
And as I am a wanderer,
your poems are the pasture—
they help me ground myself on earth
but nod to something vaster—

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In the Meantime

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 2, 2024| 13 Comments »


 
 
It is only a matter of time before
the next monsoon brings a surge
of frothing red water hurtling
down the gulley, and yet my neighbor
landscapes the flood path
with meticulously placed rocks
and raised beds with bright flowers,
and every time I drive by I want
to cheer for her foolishness,
cheer for all who make beauty
certain it will be destroyed
and relentlessly choose
to be in service to beauty anyway.

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One Inner Weather

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »

while I didn’t look up
from the storm in my book
the whole yard filled with snow

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Getting Out

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 9, 2023| 11 Comments »




Sometimes there is inside me
a space so great
my body takes itself outside—
as if the house is too restricting,
as if this inner space
must be met by something vast as field,
boundless as sky, immeasurable as interstellar space.
If it is storming, so much the better.
If rain races down the face
and saturates the clothes, this is right.
If wind rips at my hair
or snow stings my cheeks
or lightning makes my hairs stand on end,
it only serves the aliveness.
If it is warm and still,
the inner space expands
into the warm and still.
There are feelings too immense for four walls,
too intense to be trapped in the skin,
sensations that rhyme with the cosmos,
moments when we start to grasp
what we are made of—
more energy than matter,
more nothing than something,
more everything than we ever dreamed.

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One Inner Weather Report

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »


 
 
months after the storm
still,
the rain

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In the Heart

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 3, 2021| 2 Comments »




your
words
a clap
of
thunder
lightning
striking
close

and
me
without
an
umbrella

down
these
cheeks
it
must
be
the
rain

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Groundhog Day

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 1, 2021| 2 Comments »


 
 
May I not only see my own shadow
but may I let it wrestle me
the way an angel once met Jacob
then wrestled him till dawn.
May we scrabble and scrap
until I am trembling, exhausted,
until the shadow dislocates what I think I know
about how to move through the world,
until panting I beg it to bless me,
cling to it until it gives me a new name.
I want to know everything
I am capable of—the destruction,
the ferocity, the benediction.
I don’t need to know the weather.
I just want to know that I can meet
whatever comes, even
the darkest parts of myself,
and learn from them,
then limp into the daylight
toward healing, toward wholeness.

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Clean Slate

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 29, 2021| 2 Comments »

It’s almost always sunny just before
it snows—just before the sky turns grey
then meets the earth in giant swaths
of blue turned clouds turned snow turned drift,
and haven’t you sometimes wanted
to do that, too—to shift in an instant
from warm to cool, from blue to gray,
to know yourself as the opposite
of what you are, just as a day does,
an entirely new syntax unspooling
in swirling verbs and whirling predicates
so complex you forget who the subject is—
haven’t you wanted to flurry, to blizzard,
to white out until there were no tracks
like sentences left for you to follow?

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As the Pressure Drops

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on January 7, 2018| 12 Comments »

 

 

 

 

Across the country, blizzards—blizzards

so big that folks speak of bombogenesis

while standing in line in the coffee shop.

 

And the snow begins to fall, snow

blocks out the sun, snow fills the roads,

the drives, the sills until people begin to forget

 

who they are when there isn’t a storm.

Imagine the storm goes on.

Imagine that it isn’t snow falling,

 

but forgiveness. Imagine all those people

rising morning after morning to find

themselves buried in compassion.

 

Piles of it. Heaps of it. Giant white drifts of it.

It must be dealt with before anything else

can happen. Before people can even

 

walk out the door, they must lift it

and move it and feel its surprising weight.

Who knew there was so much of it? Who knew

 

just how completely it could shut things down

if not engaged with properly? It takes some time,

perhaps, before the people see

 

how beautiful it is, how every single thing

it touches is softened, turned to sparkle,

turned to shine. A disruption, to be sure,

 

but sometimes it takes a blizzard

to find the calm. Sometimes

we must be stopped

 

before we learn how to go on.

And the colder it gets, the more

we must work to be warm.

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Blessing the Weatherman’s Mistake

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 12, 2016| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

unforecast, this thawing of the heart, a puddle now where yesterday I slipped

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