Sea salt, pollen, and smoke. Particles the air needs to form a cloud. A pebble in the palm. Phrase dropped on a plate. Your words I've collected and lined up like bowls of ash, or sand, stared at, and wept. Or like our lidded glass containers: oats, wheat, and opalescent grains we use to knead our bread, yeasty loaves with raisins. Rain, relief, the irritants washed back to loam. Saliva, the body's juices that digest grit between our teeth.
Dulce Margot Van Sluytman
The ocean is a woman, And I am yours. She sends the spell of your deep blue eyes Near my wanting neck. You bend, I rise up.
You are as She deity supping on Dark dulce and green seaweed. Swallowing the scent of Seawater that laps upon Sandy shores, as you invite Behemoths to dance With you and the full moon In her splendour.
She feeds you. You feed me, Petal pulsating-pink, alive. You gaze as hazel-tinted sun rises, Underscore our pleasures. She wills only tenderness And you say one word: yes.
Thermokarst Wendy Barker
"Over thousands of miles in Alaska's interior, patches of forest sink into thermokarsts and die as swamp water floods them. It is a frequent sight on the roadside: a stand of tamarack, gray, spidery, dead, rising from muskeg water."
--William K. Stevens, The Change in the Weather
Tamarack in old habit-- firmness of permafrost's hard layers beneath-- till underground ice pockets thaw, and earth falls in, diagonal. The sky no longer up, and roots awash in bog. Melting causes spring, and health, and sex, we think, liquidities like mother's milk, kindnesses that would be kindest if dependable. When sudden flood befuddles us, how to find the bottom, or the stars.
When the raven's wing Toni H. Falls
lightly sweeps my body this tired mantle trembles, splits, sloughs away like a locust's shell, taking the smoky shadow of pain and disease. The luminescence that is mine alone will be revealed and I shall know myself again
but in a way unimagined, like the blind man, who snips threads sewn to eyelids, who slowly opens eyes long sealed and beholds himself for the first time, radiant in his wholeness.
The Divine dwelled in my heart as It lives in yours and promised me never to leave, giving me strength to live and love, Grace to hold my faith through this last, long journey, and courage to chapter my story until this body besieged grew weary and laid itself in the sweet heather of eternity.
I have not left you behind, Beloved, my spirit and our Creator reside now in your heart, and just as I was promised, I make this covenant now with you... though death may deny you my presence, it quails when challenged by the everlasting love God and I have for you.
Published 2009 Sustaining Abundant Life
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