Category: Nature Poetry

Sometimes, I close my eyes and imagine

the breeze
taking it

all

from me,
leaving purity

like sunlight on the surface of a river.

This very breath

             is the life that births leaves.

            These very leaves in evening breeze

is life that fills me.

I woke up to the light of the sun,
and it revealed all mysteries.

In a flash, I knew the meaning of a flower,
it was there in its scent
and in the pressure of its fine hairs on my skin.

The sea of my thoughts had parted
and in its place flooded the sea of sense;
my ears rumbled
when I rested on a nautilus,
and my tongue rolled along with grains
of salt speckled waves.
…  

I’m shouting into the air—
                   shouting
                         I have found it—
the meaning of shouting!

It is the air, bare
to the lungs as they squeeze
to grasp every drop of light and water.

It is that wanting, that losing,
and the prayer that then rises

from the valley to stoke
every branch on the bluffs
with flame,
and casts every shadow away
from every corner of stone
in the wake
of its journey to the peak of the sky.

Now I smile to it
before my return to night
and the dream of undivided things.

I have song for myself
that is a song for you.

I have something to say,
something clear and crisp
like water from a mountain spring.

Nothing too wordy, just straight forward,
a kiss to the heart that is felt in the moment.

This voice you hear is birdsong,
the high good mornings in the early glow of a winter dawn.
And though, I can’t sing, I do have a song.

It is a song for myself
that is a song for you.

A song aching in joints and exasperating in their creaks.
A melody weary with the troubles of the day.
An arrangement undulating with the sounds
of hunger growing hungrier, and fear becoming more afraid.

I have a voice that spreads like flowers during the flourishing of May,
a voice whose humming brightness reveals the black echo
of distant groaning and iron grinding.

There is deep and bubbling sadness
at the bottom of far-off seas.
There is deep and bubbling sadness
within nearby puddles and lakes.

The sorrows resonate inside of me,
as I feel their mournful ripples along my voice’s quivering strings.

I walk about neighborhoods whistling my tune,
but when I do, I hear it all,
the real biting blues
of silence.

I hear it all
with ears I was given to love things.

I hear it all
and my voice breaks.

I hear it all
and my tears are salted
with shaded tones of voices no longer singing,

voices no longer mirroring
the stars on the surface of their midnight faces,

voices no longer tingled
by the earthly sensations of wind and rain.

But this is why my heavy tears
have a place.

Tears nourish music,
allows song to blossom more richly
from lips—like a rose refined through grief.

I know I can’t sing well,
but I can use the teary lyric of my life to worship
the things people have lost.

I can remind the sky that inside we love
the dance of morning and night,
and seasons and breaths.

That we love the inward
and outward, ebbing
and flowing,
rhythm of seas and passions
had in velvety secret.

Though I have one voice, my song is a chorus.

It’s the friend one has in the other.
It’s the unconditional lover.
It’s the mother and father.

I sing to protect you.
I sing to caress you.
I sing to tell you stories at night.

Though you may feel
isolated within the belly of darkness,
and the air that slips through the cracks may feel
as cold as hell can be,
I want you to note
the music hiding in the whispers of cold.

I want you to listen, to hear
the refrain that says to you,

kindly and truthfully,

One is never alone.

In the morning, there is the bird
firmly perched atop your shoulder,
and he is singing his tune,
a tune alive with the goodness of sensation,
of pulse in veins and air in lungs,
and soft long light along soft skin.

He is singing boldly and playfully,
dancing with goosebumps rising,
rising with the sun and the hour
of your life and his note;

rising,
it keeps rising,

this song he sings,
this song he cries, this song I sing for you.