DESERT DREAMING 

City lights 

at the edge of

a desert's darkness 

look like an oasis 

when it awakens 

to the dream of thirst.

My next online poetry workshop for non-poets 

is on Sunday, July 20 at 2pm PDT.

For more info and to register click here.

 

HEAVEN SENT

I was raised Catholic,

went to parochial school 

and was an altar boy,

so I spent much of my youth

contemplating heaven.

Only yesterday, more than fifty 

decades after my church

going days, did heaven

become truly real to me.

It bowed before me

with its branches 

of porcelain blossoms.

It appeared like an angel

annunciating its annunciations

through rivers of petals.

It greeted me in all its

grandeur and grace

in a Pennsylvania park.

It unfurled its firmament

as a dogwood tree.

FIELD GUIDE

Just when you think you can’t 

walk any farther and there’s

nothing but bogland stretching

for miles ahead of you

and the sky is threatening to

unleash a fury of rain and fire

or both (because it has and it can)

just then is when the clouds

shape and shift into a symbol

you recognize as if they, in their

knowing, knew exactly what 

you needed to see, a sign

that no stone, scripture or Irish air

could hold so simply.

This sudden revelation could happen

anywhere or at any time,

in the skies of Connemara, Kentucky or

in a remote region of your own body.

Opening to it, to love, is always

the answer, no matter 

the weather or conditions of 

your searching, seeking heart.

 

COMING HOME

And… when you return home 

from wherever  you are coming from, 

from the place you disappeared to in the night

long and not so long ago,

free of the rumor and innuendo

you left on some distant shore 

or at some distant door,

come having bowed and breathed 

all your breath into

the questions and koans 

that you finally let find you.

Come as if risen 

like a spirit or lost child 

from an ancient and not so ancient souterrain.

Come having met and memorized your own 

strange and beautiful silhouette.

And promise when you come, you’ll bring a fire, 

a fire you’ll carry deep inside your mind.

And come with the rock, wind, and rain 

in your body’s sinew, bone and blood,

and with a keening in your mending broken heart.

Come with stories, songs and invitations.

Come with conversations that no one need interpret 

or claim as right or wrong.

Come with horizons rugged, fierce 

and rounded within you.

Come speaking in your mother’s 

mother’s mother’s tongue. 

And when you finally do set foot upon the soil

that is closest to the simplicity of your soul,

come with a single, solitary message

for those you love and struggle most not to love:

tell them, do not be the swan 

that only sings its song while dying. 

Tell them, instead, to sing their song 

every morning of every day.

Tell them to sing it at every threshold

and with the courage of a country

that knows its blossoms,

the silver of its moon,

and the golden treasure of its sun, 

and every bite of its bitter 

and not so bitter apple.

And tell them once and for all

to let their song wander with them

like a pilgrim walking 

their living, breathing prayer.