The house of Love is not
a tent I need to hold up with my hands –
I don’t need to be tentative –
don’t need to try the ropes
or mend the canvas,
don’t need to canvas
for votes or for acceptance
The house of Love
is never taken down,
nor can it be abandoned –
we live here with abandon,
and welcome everyone
to find it home.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 19, 2023
I, too, can be a holder of home,
the place where you feel comfortable,
where it is understood
that what you say will be received,
who you are will be accepted
Let me hold home for all of us,
where none of us need clutch a shelter
around our heads, where the broad roof
covers us amply,
and wind can blow through
if we want it to, bringing scents
from woods and field
None of us need to invent ourselves
and maybe get it wrong – at home,
everyone’s being flows from the source -generative harmony
creating us endlessly,
leaving no place for a rift,
making our presence a gift.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 14, 2023
After many intervening years, I pretend
that stings of isolation from my early days
didn’t mark me,
didn’t set my mind on long and searching struggles,
didn’t define, in any way, my sense of self
Not to say there is no sense
in which that pretense counts as true,
for did I not work hard
to overcome the stigma?
Did I not form bonds that proved me
worthy of connection?
And did I not carry these – what I had gained –
back as proof? And wasn’t I gratified
to find myself graciously received?
Yes, and …
Yes, but …
Some part of me cries out for truth.
Some part of me wants to be reckoned with
I may have overcome the sense of not deserving,
along with social gaps that put me
in the line of shunning,
but this is not a smooth sea.
I have worked hard for this, my innocence.
I have worked hard for yours, as well.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 11, 2023
All of us want to be seen,
and all of us want to be known,
and each of us senses
the worth of our being,
the light that is wholly our own
And none of us want to be judged,
and none of us want to be told
of changes we need to make,
habits we need to break
if we would enter the fold
All of us want to be free,
and want our connections, too –
we want to belong
in a place where we’re honored,
and honor our friends through and through.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 18, 2023
It’s not so hard
to be of the tribe of yes,
the ones that make you glad you’re here,
the ones that want you
and everything you are
It’s not so hard
to hold the yes till it soaks through
any layers of worry and self doubt,
and proves itself to be
the only thing that’s there
Look how we soften,
look how we shine
when held so easily
in the glowing yes
of the tribe.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 6, 2022
You talk about healing.
I want you to know
that I will not accept as healing
that which insists that I stuff my rage,
be polite about my pain,
and sets me on a postage stamp of
“seeing the good,”
a narrow strip of positive
To be whole, I need a truth so large
it swallows my complaint,
wraps up everything I am
in its embrace,
silences my howling
in the full-home chord
of welcome,
has space enough for all of me to soar.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 13, 2022
Gratefully I receive
tutelage in Love’s intelligence,
which teaches me to drop
uneasy vibes of being judged
and come home to my love’s source,
which is so vast, it can subsume
any judgment, any wound –
it can embrace the whole of anyone
so thoroughly
that even the tiniest shards of ice
melt away.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 15, 2022
So sweet it is to find
how spring touches everything,
here, just as where we were before –
how light affirms
that each of us has our opening,
our place to bloom, our fragrance –
Home springs out from our breath and our movement,
taking in the present blessing,
blessing each place where we are.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 5, 2022
Let me leave the lumps behind
(collateral of judgment)
let the things I say lift free
like flame, like grace,
like being moved by music
in a dance with no pretension
Let me abandon
all pontification, weights
that can fall haplessly
on someone else’s toes,
let my expression
welcome others to their own,
let it celebrate their light
such that we multiply –
our signal spanning light years,
our radiance close at hand,
bringing warmth and life
to all the land.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 15, 2021
Who am I to say I know
all the forms of love, or even think
that I would recognize them? Much less,
to place myself as expert, curator
Oh no, I’m here to see,
and gather what I can,
and hold the hope of tasting
something old or new of love
everywhere I turn
I will not try to catalog the infinite.
Instead, I will be glad to have been given
the faculty to see love in the ways I can,
which makes this puzzled earth
a present heaven.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 16, 2021