Why it makes me happy
to see the half moon
while looking up to harvest
high growing peas
must be a human thing,
or rather, something things that see
might share, curve of pea reiterated
in the curve of moon,
my needing to look up to reach the peas
occasioning the sighting –
day moon colored like a cloud,
returning, with my sight of it,
all the other times it’s made me glad.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 7, 2022
See how many things the day is made of –
deeply rooted things, daily growing things,
things ephemeral as light against the clouds,
fleeting and eternal as ideas
I look up from my tasks,
and any one of them can fill me suddenly
with joy, and with a deeper sense of why.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 6, 2022
Early evening rain sings down the gutters
and into the tank,
trees and garden stretch tall and strong and happy,
We have done well –
we finished our tasks before the shower,
we have earned our companionship
and our easy rest.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 5, 2022
I can’t plan for my mortality –
the very stuff of it
falls apart like silt –
nothing I can build with
has anything to do with it
I can’t plan either
for your mortality –
I have to live as if
we have eternity to learn
the perfect grace for which we daily strive –
it is the only way that I can pick up
these essential strands
of all we care about,
and weave them day by day.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 3, 2022
The paths they each were taking
couldn’t be seen on the surface,
couldn’t be seen by each other
or even by themselves
They swooped and soared like kites,
and you might think they were governed
by the wind. But all the while
they felt the tug beneath,
the anchored place that didn’t move much,
but was their guidance,
enabling their flight
whether they knew it or not.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 2, 2022
I remembered a thing about birds –
how they need gravity
in order to fly,
how they squirt themselves through the air
using their weight to lean into the wind cushion,
a thing they show us
about using the weight of our days
for taking off.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 1, 2022
Am I allowed to come back to
happiness as a normal state?
Am I allowed, despite naivete
I have been disabused of,
despite egregious flaws
of which I’ve now become aware,
to live a day in simple joy?
And maybe many of them,
day after day (like I’ve been doing)?
Can it be real that I have left the fear behind
(the fear of falling to my deserved demise)?
Here at my center,
a tender truth is telling me
stay here. Stay here always
to learn this yes.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 28, 2022
There’s a certain delight
in setting things down just so,
starting a conversation
in texture and color,
source and form
These silent things
speak of connections
I can almost make,
in a language
I can almost understand.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 28, 2022
Evening coolness begins to flow in
through the tops of trees,
deeply welcome
after the day’s heat
Everything has meaning –
blackbird song and colors through the windows,
the ponderous importance of everybody’s life.
Even moths and dandelion fluffs
have infinite weight
in the balance of eternity,
as do you, my friend,
as do you.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 27, 2022
Sometimes I feel myself swimming,
as structures dissolve around me –
all the things that people try to count on,
all the reasons people give for living
There still seems to be a grand march
of purpose – many marches –
stridently in conflict,
but my sense of what is real
sinks right through them –
I can’t align myself to their directions
Sometimes I feel new life forming –
seeds amidst the liquid,
reaching out to web together,
understanding substance in a way
we haven’t done before,
giving me a place to plant my hope.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 26, 2022