Did anyone ever teach you how to write a manifesto?What did it say?Was it written on the lines of your grandmother’s hands?Was it lost in the work?Was it lost when you had children?Was it lost when your work of caretakingwas undervalued? Was it used to line the pockets of the rich and powerful?Was it given away with a sigh or sold for food on the … Continue reading Did Ever Teach You How To Write A Manifesto?
What exactly is it that makes a June afternoon so precious that you just know it happened before, or will happen again, or is happening concurrently somewhere just beyond comprehension? Maybe a place where the light is so saturated with love that it creates visible forms. I look out across the wide James, and out at a blue sky with fresh clouds from under the … Continue reading Down Easy
I squat down on a dance-floor of lavender glass to touch the tiny shells appearing to do rapid summersaults all along the shores of the Atlantic. I stop to feel all the other people at the edge of this sea right now and am swept up by the bigness of the world. You appear expansively. You appear like cumulonimbus clouds at sea, swelling rapidly like … Continue reading How You Appear
Held The first time you taste the sorrow of the worldis when you begin to notice your own mother’s broken heart.You are a child and this observation awakens your mind.You read the muscles and lines on her face,the patterns and colors playing across her forehead,and it’s like standing at the mirror because that same story is written on your spinal column. You feel it like … Continue reading Held
Moving On, In and Out I found myself shakingsending a text in a threatening moment. My protectorsvery efficiently sent light speed signalsigniting nerves and thoughtstime traveling backwards to the place when I was confronted with the reality of the danger I was facing in the dark drivewayin the upstairs hallway. I could take all this as a sign that I haven’t moved on yet. But … Continue reading Moving On, In and Out
Stepping Through the Year to Yule One day in early SpringI stepped into the woods to see the forest bare one last time. Nothing but brown leavesgrey trunksflashes of fuschia redbuds. I stepped into my son’s smile to see him as a child one last year. I woke too early in the morning to contemplate the color of my own eyes in that particular light. … Continue reading Stepping Through the Year Into Yule
Doreen Valiente created poetry that gave the rituals of Wicca a life and colour that contributed to the growth and popularity of the movement and which have become the standard texts of many modern pagan groups. The Doreen Valiente Foundation has uncovered many more of Doreen’s unpublished poems and published some of them in the book “The Charge Of The Goddess”. The Charge Of The … Continue reading Charge of the Goddess
Watching you be yourself be a dad giving so freely taking delight. Perfect affection. Matching brown eyes and brown hair. Your shared laughter heals my deepest wound like nothing ever has. Watching her fearlessly need you and be supported every time. Your patience with this little one radiates out and the warmth of it settles on the shoulders of my past selves like a warm … Continue reading Father and Daughter
The Hike The way up was punctuated with little chanterelles. Tiny orange stepping stones for lively evanescent fea feet. So unlike my human feet. Mile after mile, always up… I didn’t want to be breathing so hard. I didn’t want to be so tired. I thought I should be better. Somewhere near the summit I started to cry. It was terrifying to seem so weak. … Continue reading The Hike
The seasons in the Eastern Woodlands are like one long breath in the body: It starts in the still nothing of winter’s empty sleep. Deep in the roots, the pelvic floor, where life begins. It grows through the sacral Spring into a teeming river, abounding waters, observed by regal Cormorants, resting on river rocks with their vampire beaks uplifted. Singing green and yellow branches, brave … Continue reading The Rustle of Winter is the Seed of Spring
Merenda Cecelia 