Category Archives: Audio

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

Soul Retrieval

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No, no,
This is not the promise you were given
Mountains of detritus,
Self-enforced confinement
Stress and tracks of weary years
Across your face

No
This is not your course
The clock-enforced conformity
The envious and jealous stabs within
Reflexive judgement,
Passing down the curse
Of being conquered

However much the rules you’re taught
claim to control
You never could be severed
from your soul

Hold with me now
Together, let’s sing your song
It leads you back along the lines of longing
To where you’ve always sensed that you belong
We’ll all converge there jubilantly thronging
At home as if we never had been gone

Let our eyes now feed each other’s embers
Resurrect our light so we remember
What had seemed so lost from us, so far
Who we’ve ever been
And who we are.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 14, 2012


(background music: Max Richter, “Embers”)

Idols

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Winds of Spirit
Sweep my thought
It’s time to cast out idols
Those who ask for time
Those who ask for blood
Those who ask for tiresome daily ritual
Who say they have the power
to save my sorry life
or, if I fail to worship,
occasion my demise

But they know nothing, and their mouths can’t speak
The life they offer is anemic, weak
And Spirit shows me, right here, what I am
Exposing all their noxious threats as sham

I will not worship
the god of appearances
I will not worship
the god of social norms
I will not worship
the god of shopping bargains
I will not worship
the god of health concerns

Winds of Spirit, sweep my soul
for I am made to worship 
what is true and whole
That frames the space for all that’s free and wild
And holds us each as Life’s untrammeled child.


©Wendy Mulhern
February 6, 2012

(background music: Max Richter, “Haunted Ocean”)

Deliverance Prayer

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Deliverance Prayer (background music “The Blessing” by Isaac Shepard)

Bring my soul up out of Egypt
Walk me step by patient step
out of the patterns that enslave me
Release me from the lockstep
that doesn’t look
that is afraid to seek the kinship of a smile
 
Teach me to spin out on the leaf edge
of the wind
and twirl into the knowing
of the infinite variety —
Intricacies which Life has ever blessed
 
Let me no longer follow
the commands that run them over
that allow us three or four straight norms at best
Unclamp my feet from marching
Free my toes
to find the subtle footholds
midst the wildness of the river
 
Free the rivers, too
and let us all please tumble brightly
down the perfect, wild, unchanneled 
course that we were born for
Let us know each other 
deeply, truly, freely
 
Bring my soul up out of Egypt
That I may worship
My Good.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 3, 2012
 
photo by Edward Mulhern
 

Emptiness

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Only things that can receive
can be empty.
Consider this, O hearts, O arms —
The grand capacity of your design
How expertly you have been made
To hold, to take in
shelter and contain
To heal, embrace,
and then release again
To empty, fill, and so engage
in life, the grand enacting of creation
Exultant in its endless generation.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 27, 2012

(Picture: Jennifer McCurdy, “Gilded Vortex Vessel”; photo by Gary Mirando; background music: Max Richter, “From the Rue Villin”)

Ode to Beethoven

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So many years before my birth

Beethoven wrote the score
of my internal landscape.
His music opens doors
to wind-tossed trees and
fervent heady breathing of the day
the seething susurrus of grasses
and the pulsing of the light
and the fragrance of the air
and the insects’ humming flight —
How did he know?

His music walks
with sure and practiced steps
along the pathways of my hopes
my efforts and my struggles
through the darkness
to the ever unsuppressed
returning dawning of my joy
and the centered peace
that is my home—
His genius for me is not that he 
heard something no one else could hear
but that he wrote so truly
what is mine.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 18, 2012

(Background music: Beethoven’s 6th Symphony)

Understanding

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Turn the tumblers, one and then another
For you to enter, all must be aligned
It opens to the easy spinning 
of your secret
Or to the deep discernment
of a listening mind.

Don’t settle for the superficial level
The one that opens up without a key
Where all may stroll 
but none may know the meaning
For to be true, the entrance must be deep

Beneath the layer of rationalization
Beneath the tallies of the service due
Beneath self-image and self-fabrication
A more fulfilling essence waits for you

Go deep, for underneath 
the thoughts that you can voice as words
You’ll feel the breath and pause
whose choice is to be heard
in silence, and in limpid images
that let you understand what really is.


©Wendy Mulhern
January 10, 2012


(music in background of recording: Isaac Shepard, “Dimming the Lights”)

Attitude of Dance

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    Two trees
Their limbs now bare
Reveal an attitude of dance
The smaller one
Leaning in to feel the sweet enclosure
Of the other’s arms
The larger one
Awed and grateful
Holding such a rare and precious gift

Along the dance of time
The moment
The truth of their embrace, their love
Is held
While we, ephemeral
May wander by it
May be drawn in 
By moments we have felt
Which may remain
Long after we have danced them
A memory this kind of stance imparts
As stable as if formed in living wood
Enduring as a tree
Within our hearts.


©Wendy Mulhern
December 7, 2011

(background music: Isaac Shepard, “Letting Go”)

Untying Time

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We find ourselves as characters
Unfinished, emerging 
as on time’s great loom
we’re woven,
The colors of our purpose and desires
Slow-forming on its tapestry of story
With wefts that wrap and then dip down
unseen
And poke up further on between the warps
The things we know, then don’t,
Then know again
The breathless trailing edges
of our hopes . . .

But then
We may view time as our dimension
Something we’ve stretched out
upon a frame
Coordinates established by our mind force
to help us understand our vital being
And maybe time, and time’s whole tapestry
We’ll take up one day, like a mighty cloak
to wrap ourselves
But then to fling away
So we may stride in freedom
since we know
That we endure, outside of time, eternal
And the day
No longer bound 
May then be redefined
And time be understood again
As rhythm
A beat to dance, a riff to sing
A harmony
An endless field and we the masters
Untied from time 
Aloft on Spirit’s wing.

©Wendy Mulhern
November 24, 2011

(Background music: Isaac Shepard, “Thoughtful”)

Receiving

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    I won’t dismiss as ego
The need to be received
Wrapped in a soft receiving blanket
Passed from arm to arm, enchanting
Cooed over
Welcomed
And cradled then especially
In loving and protective arms
To look out knowing
You are guarded fiercely
And treasured more than anything before.

Why should we think this need would go away
because our bones have grown
our circles widened out?
This need must grow apace with all our being
To knit us to our tribe
and show us how, in turn, 
we’re made to so receive each other
To welcome, to accept, respect and love
An ancient gift that we must now recover
to reach our peace, our purpose, and our home.
©Wendy Mulhern
     November 25, 2011


(Background music: Isaac Shepard, “Memories Never Fade”)

Steady rain, steady love

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    As sure as rain
That falls into the ebbing year
With pools for our reflection
When the ripples clear
As sure as rain
That summons windshield wipers’ thrash
And vigilance in traffic
As the trucks’ sprays blast
The hypnotic, droning rhythm
That propels us on toward night
And the dampening of leaves
Impelled, thus, to their final flight
As sure as rain
This law:
That steady love
Poured out in constant stream
With no concern for consequence, no shame
Or thought what it may seem
Will call the same.


©Wendy Mulhern
November 23, 2011

Music in background: Sprinkle to Rain by Isaac Shepard