When Great Trees Fall

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Maya Angelou

I was 14 when I first read “Phenomenal Woman”. I needed it then. I was…awkward. Too smart, not skinny enough, too opinionated, not pretty enough, too honest, not fashionable enough, too hard on myself. Maya Angelou spoke to my soul. I daresay she has spoken to many souls over the years. Her words are an ode to the infinite greatness of the human spirit–of the good, the beauty, the love, the strength, the promise of courage we carry within us…of our ability to use that promise to overcome that baseness within and without.

Maya Angelou has died today. But more importantly, she lived. She lived a life of infinite greatness, of creativity, of courage, of love. She lived what she wrote, and we are all the greater for it. May she rest in peace, and may we continue to hear the wisdom of her spirit long after this day.

A great tree has fallen, and our senses will never be the same.

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”

― Maya Angelou

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Sedna

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sedna

Sedna, by Thalia Took

black eyes peer from blackness
hair like tangled seaweed, current tossed
framed in the gates of gleaming white bone
so young to be so cold
anger buried deep

encased in Ice
rage a frozen scream
hands hacked to pieces
cannot even brush her tangled hair
the dark is silent
the deep is still

She waits
Her blood flows in sticky metallic drips
eddying into dark cold waters
flows into the shapes
dolphins whales seal otter shark
keening as harpoons strike

she feels each hit
as if it were her own flesh
pierced

She waits
She sees Her children sinking, motionless
She sees their blood flow into the black water night

when She rises
who will pay Her price
who will brush her tangled hair

when the ice cracks
can you appease her hidden rage

Monday Musings in Verse

Tags

mary oliver, poems, poetry, unitarian universalist

A morning of poems by Mary Oliver, an American poet born in the 1930’s and sometimes called the “unofficial Unitarian Universalist poet-laureate”…

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

an excerpt from One or Two Things

The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only that you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

redemped

we need a god who bleeds now

a god whose wounds are not

some small male vengeance

some pitiful concession to humility

a desert swept with drying marrow in honor of the lord

we need a god who bleeds

spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet

thick & warm like the breath of her

our mothers tearing         to let us        in

this place breaks open

like our mothers bleeding

the planet is heaving              mourning our ignorance

the mood tugs the seas

to hold her/ to hold her

embrace swelling hills/ i am

not wounded i am bleeding to life

we need a god who bleeds now

whose wounds are not the end of anything

*we need a god who bleeds now, by ntozake shange*

A Mermaid Knows

Tags

goddess, mermaid, ocean, poetry

by Irene Young

A mermaid dives deep.
She is not afraid of
what may be buried at the
bottom of her fluid heart.

She is not frozen in fear
watching from the dunes.
Instead a mermaid swims the waters
where she bathes in her own
self love.

To be a sea maid, one must breathe
with the wisdom of that freedom
is not walking the shore, but
touching the bottom with faith
that one rebounds to fresh waters,
through open eyes, with clear lungs,
a willing heart, and new skin
to breathe out the old,
and in the daring.

A mermaid knows
memory is both
a chain that binds,
and the key that frees;
And
the truth that heals
in the name of The Mother,
The Daughter, and The Holy Self.
Amen.