Tag Archives: depression

Come now, and let us reason together

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though you may feel the tug
into the small box of sadness
though you may curl up there
though you may feel
in all honesty
it’s your only choice
the only thing that’s true and real

though you have no desire to fight
and from that standpoint
you see no reason why you’d want to,
this is not the story for you to choose

Consider life, after all.
Then your despair, or if you quibble
with the term, your nihilism,
could not exist except as foil
to all you’ve ever loved —
to love itself — and yet that love
has no need of an opposite
to be itself

By which you see
the love alone is real,
and so you might as well relax
and let it shine.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 11, 2020

Rainy

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I let myself fill up with rain.
It was an indulgence,
not something to sustain,
not something I have time for
in the day to day,
while the various buckets
we put under leaks
register their irregular
pticks and clangs and taps,
and hope seems to be leaking, too

We will get through this —
our source of strength does not depend
on all things rosy.
It will show itself steady,
well able to overcome
both internal and external rain.

©Wendy Mulhern
September 9, 2019

A kind of lostness

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There was nothing substantial
to make a poem with
in that squid-inky mass of emotions
that squished around on the currents
of deep sighs, and a breeze
a little too cold to fall asleep in,
a state that could pass
like the swing of a hammock
or an adjacent snore
of exhaustion, late in the afternoon
of a day so unabashedly brilliant
that no kind of lostness
made any sense,
yet there it was,
waiting to be redeemed.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 23, 2019

Dry

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I felt my vessel
had become a sieve,
suddenly unable
to capture and retain
that which would slake my thirst

For though the day was not devoid of brightness,
I found no pool within,
in which to reflect —
just a dry concavity
in which to feel alone,
a place collecting shadows
and the sound of bones.

©Wendy Mulhern
December 13, 2018

Protection

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We need to put our heads together
and entwine our arms,
make a structure,
an impervious protection,
need to spread it largely out —
over everyone, in fact —
to hold us safe,
hold us all within

So when that old corkscrewing vortex
comes hurtling, twisting through
with its cold insinuation,
“what’s the point of you?”
we will each know
it has no toehold
in our sense of what is true,
and that old lie
will simply fall away.

©Wendy Mulhern
November 17, 2018

Taking the Train

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We have come so far
along this haphazard path,
our footsteps not following
what we thought held our gaze,
our gaze, it turns out, being
too distracted and unfocused
to draw us to our hoped-for destinations

We will take the train —
its paths are laid down,
we don’t need to determine every step.
We’ll arrive where it takes us,
and if our lives feel unmoored, uprooted,
we won’t notice that so much
as long as we are moving.

©Wendy Mulhern
November 16, 2018

Indeed

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wind, indeed

The wind chimes sang to me
through the night
and into the morning —
they sweetened my dreams
and my prospects.

They were untiring
in their celebration of
the wind that came
up ocean, through trees,
across the craggy rocks of mountains,
bringing the fragrance of
the powerful rightness of everything,
that which returns each day, as if
all our pathetic twistedness
had not touched it at all

And indeed
the freshness that escapes
in these rifts of wind
is proof.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 10, 2016

Window

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Oak Bluffs sunrise June 2015

I waited for joy to come
like rain clearing,
but the rain didn’t —
I found myself tensed against
its cold drops, and against
the tasks at hand
(or lack of other ones)

I noticed there was nothing
I could summon to pine for,
no conditions that I felt
occasioned or could remedy
the gray occlusion of my countenance

Later I remembered
how anyone can be a bright window —
Anyone can show a tiny hope,
just enough to engage the recognition
that brings me back,
that fills me up with light.

©Wendy Mulhern
March 9, 2016

Simply

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2012-07-14 river

This love was always
such a simple thing —
love of your bones, your limbs,
your snuggle, your warm, heavy head

How could I fail so utterly
to know my only duty
was to pass that love still gleaming,
my bone to yours, shiny and smooth,
clear, unequivocal,
holy and pure?

Here is my prayer —
in your presence to see
that this crucial transmission
has always been given,
with joy to perceive
that you’ve always received it,
it never depended on me.

©Wendy Mulhern
June 23, 2015