Category Archives: Audio

These are poems I recorded. Some of them have musical backgrounds, selected and mastered by my son.

Love and Magic: Three Enchantments

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 I.
When people love
they make magic
Everything living responds to it
Land rises up at its touch
Joyfully bends as it bends them
Brings forth a beauty
that calls forth their love again
making both ever more rich.
II.
In the dance of love
The will does not reside in either entity
It hovers in that charged and potent
mystic space between them
When they move to follow it
it’s nothing like
the simple, hollow closure
that comes from exercising one’s own will
It’s an exhilaration
and it brings a jubilation
and a satisfaction nothing else can fill.
III.
Magic is real
It is the dance of love
Everyone who loves creates it
sparkling in everything they touch
Others, when they see it, know it
Even if it’s nothing they can name
That which has been loved
will lift them
Bless them so they’ll never be the same. 

©Wendy Mulhern
March 27, 2012


(background music: Isaac Shepard, “Into Spring”)



The Currency of Hearts

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for Leo and Magda

For those who understand
the currency of hearts
nothing else is needed
though many things can be used
A smile, a hug, an offering of food
A sympathetic tear, consoling words
The currency of hearts
affords a richness
you can’t accrue in any other way
It multiplies its treasure instantly
Fills souls with joy as sun fills up the day
It doesn’t matter what you have
How large your gift, how polished you appear
It’s not the gift that makes you rich
But that you honored
your own heart’s desire
to share.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 24, 2012


(background music: Isaac Shepard, “Triumph of Love”)





Monday, downtown

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Monday Downtown (background music: Isaac Shepard “Before Dawn”)


Oh, humanity!
Working at your tired charades
Moving through so many empty boxes
Desiccated corridors
Courses without meaning

Look how amazing you are!
Look how, even when the rules are cast
to close out any purpose, light or joy
You still find ways to shine:
Within this skewed account of life
your light slips through the chinks
and though at times refracted
blazes forth
Makes us maybe take a while to notice
all the places where it is suppressed
Just think: if we were free
what brilliance we would show

It is our destiny
We will prevail
We will shine clear
We’ll banish all the false demands
The failed array of hoops, constrictive bands
Deny the faulty purposes
that disappointed us
Swing free
on the strength of our unstoppable
creative rush!

©Wendy Mulhern
March 19, 2012


Lullaby for Heather

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Mother Love, wrap up your child
in comprehensive arms
Broad enough to hold her every hope
Soft enough to nurture all her charms
Close enough to smooth her brow
and rest her eyes
Strong enough to bear her 
swiftly through the dreaming skies
Synchronize her heart with yours
Refresh her with your peace
Deliver her with clarity
and new found ease
Mother Love, infuse her with
your bright delight
and bold and brilliant action
in the morning light.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 18, 2012

(background music: Max Richter, “Fragment”)

All I want

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(background music Isaac Shepard “All Smiles”)



All I want
is everything —
It’s not too much to ask
All I want is oneness
To soar in tune
in the surging seething symphony
of being
To be the roaring pounding flow
of all things living
To have my own song
constantly meet its harmony
My rhythm locked ecstatically
in polyrhythmic counterpoint
My down-bounce catapulting
someone else’s flight
All I want
in this moment
is the bright contact
that multiplies light
That pulses back the richest chord
and wraps us
in its sacred ring of sound.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 11, 2012



Being One

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Together we are

so much older
than how we think of you and I
It’s said our DNA is from the stuff of stars
concocted in their furnace
in the ancient skies

The blood we share
knows that it’s one ocean
It doesn’t feel the boundaries between
It pulses through us in a steady motion
Reveals that we are what we’ve always been

Though atomized for now
we are one body
We long for nothing more than going home
to where we feel the fall of every heartbeat
Each keeping our own rhythm
though we breathe as one
To move as one fulfills us primally
Our wave reverberating to eternity.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 9, 2012


(background music: Max Richter “Interior Horses”)



Moon Lullaby

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Lay my head on moon-touched clouds
Suffuse my sleep with moonbeams
Let their coolness flow along my breath
Their sweetness reaching deep into my dreams
So permeating, let its light refresh
with gentle steadfastness
my halting meditation
Bring to me the comprehensive rest
that stills my heart’s incessant perturbations
Hold me in your light
till morning’s wings arise
to bear me into day’s resplendent skies.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 7, 2012

(background music: Isaac Shepard, “Foolish Youth”)


On the bus

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On The Bus (Background Music: Max Richter “Horizon Variations”)


On the bus
I look at you
and you, and you
and think of you as loved.

I notice, suddenly, how cute
you are — those shoes
and how your feet slip into them
That chin, that slight tilt of your nose
And you, that face, that’s smiled
so many times, that has such memories
within its lines
Could be your smile right now is from the thought
of something twenty, forty years ago . . .

I do it as an exercise
I think of you as loved . . .
I find a smile has settled
on my face
And now, a visual litany
a thought parade of those I love
Recites itself unceasing
in my mind

A treasure, this
Well worth the weight of carrying
Indeed, it carries me
with all the energy I need
into my day.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 5, 2012






Weight and Lightness

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Nothing in this world —
Nothing —
Not houses, not credentials
Not webs of friendship —
Has any strength to hold
the steady falling of the heart

They break like spider silk
against its weight
And it will fall right through
until it feels
the centered force of its own gravity
Until it slows
in thoughtful drift
and feels the atmosphere that gathers
meditatively
around its presence

Everything in this world —
Everything —
Each sense of home, each memory
Each smile exchanged —
Has grace to hold
the precious light that shines upon it

Grace to catch that light
and shine it forth
and be illuminated
Light that has no weight
That sits so brightly
on each snow crystal, each
hair of thistle down, each poised hope
that meekly lifts itself
into its own being.

© Wendy Mulhern
February 27, 2012

(background music: Isaac Shepard, “People and Puddles”)

The worth of a life

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What is the worth of a life?
Is there a metric for this?
Consider the sun on the water
The sparkling path
which always presents itself
right where you are:
Each sparkle is for you—
the meeting of light with your eyes—
Though others see sparkles too,
they aren’t the same ones that you view.

What is the worth of a life?
As if you could separate 
One life from all others—
From the sun’s sparkles, isolate one
Take it away from the sun . . .
What is the worth of a life?
There is no measure for this
No way the question can make any sense
It’s worth everything that there is.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 23, 2012

(background music: William Ackerman, “Anne’s Song”