Wind, Whispering Flecks of leaves and sun dust the water – molasses-brown haze of mud and mangroves, roots curve in cobwebbed barks. Wood ducks and song birds summon her, pink flush just beginning to stipple eggs, nests etched into cups of twig and straw. Winter’s mourning wanes. An egret nods once then pierces the stillness, […]

Thrill Seeker The one who walks a tightrope across canyons invites the Specter in for tea and conversation His balancing pole, arcing toward ground, etches the line between fate and faith, living and leaving His quick, delicate steps bounce the wire in an improvised midair ballet performed joyfully on the crescendo of silent prayer   […]

All I Ever Had Christianity marked us, but it marked you, my dear sister, more than anyone I knew. Mom hated it. She hated anything that threatened the household. I never saw her so angry as when you took me to be baptized. After that, she stopped speaking to you. Dad liked talking about Christianity […]

Walking I go walking barefoot every night. I want to feel the path my life follows: the touch of dew of the new green grass, the crisscrossing pine needles, thin and sharp, the brittle brush of bushes, piercing the pads of my feet. All of it, all of it, I want to feel so I […]

Waystation —after a photograph by Barbara Jabaily Sun burns a cross into the frozen lake century old bristlecone pines circling round as audience to those who left prints in the snow. The sun did this, not as it rose but as it set into Wet Mountains in the Sangre de Cristo Range. I look at […]

Ocean Whispers I believe in the ocean. I worship quietly in her liquid comfort without fanfare, in her smaller bodies of saltwater, the inlets and the bays, along her shoreline where seaweed skids into a foamy paste, exchanging a few sacred whispers, a heavenly sun to illuminate her presence, an impromptu hymn from the saints […]

For the Sorrowing There is a tree down by the river. By a stubborn piece of bark a solitary branch clings to its trunk. We are so frail, yet by a stubborn piece of hope we cling to a life dug deep. At a given moment we may be seized by a wind so strong, […]

Who Stopped? Forgetting begins when we leave a world of beauty, belonging, imagination; tactile closeness to clouds, the stars, the leaves; as if there’s no separation; no distance to travel. Reaching, reaching yearning to touch; reunite. We turn from the world that is a net; a weave that holds us all; all things. Remember when […]

Southwark Cathedral If the gnarled veined fingers Of an old grey man, Stretched up a hundred feet Above my head, With fingers interlaced, And nails silver painted, And wrists all decorated, By the dead Then I could believe I was in the cathedral, And it may say something For the soul of stone, That the […]