Your being gone
tells me acutely
all this is dream,
all this is dream
I see its edges —
see where the tapestry
meets the loom,
the threads I chose,
how they were woven,
how they have made
what is depicted here
It isn’t sorrow
so much as recognition —
how what I thought and feared
became this picture,
and from this standpoint
my hope is greater
that I will see, sometime,
all that is real.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 14, 2019
I find myself suddenly hungry
for fiction, for magic,
for peppermint mochas
in well-lighted places,
for time to get lost in a book
At the end of my dream
I found myself flying,
flapping huge wings
that started as arms,
down the dirt and gravel road
through the woods,
back to the cabin
I stayed up late last night
reading and tending the fire
till I was too sleepy to continue.
The sleepiness returned today
before the work was over,
and the book was also calling me
We’ll go home soon,
and dreams will be my friends,
giving me story while they also
give me rest.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 10, 2019
This could be one dream,
could be another
(as I awoke this morning
after saying “would you like a spoon?”)
—a setting, and some people,
and the day to day familiarity
of being — nothing high stakes,
nothing too emotional,
just the exchange of words
and the exchange of gifts
A place I put myself
no more or less
than putting myself here —
in this afternoon
of wind and trees and rest
and taking in what’s given,
taking it, and calling it what’s here.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 31, 2019
Before you go to sleep,
before you slip
into the sweet kaleidoscope
that mirrors and recombines
all you saw and felt
throughout the day
Before you turn out lights
and leave the moon
to its bright vigil
through the night
Before releasing your thoughts
like doves
to fly to their home roosts
Remember what you are
and how it guides you
through your dreams
as well as through your day.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 15, 2019
With great effort, I practice
what I don’t even try for with dreams —
that waking up and seconds later
forgetting everything, feeling the shift
into the day’s perspective,
deep sigh of steadying, reset,
to feel the flush of energy
take hold, like well filled sails,
to launch me forward in pursuits at hand
I take the effort, thus,
to reset my impressions,
my conclusions, my opinions —
on noticing the ways
they’ve boxed me in, and bent me down,
to let them go, forget them all,
and set my sails for winds of truth to fill.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 25, 2019
I will trust you to be there
in the morning, after the washing clear
of all the wear lines of the day,
after dreams have danced in water-like dimension
through the fluidity that wipes it all away
Somewhere in that time
well before sunrise,
when we awake and start
our pre-departure gatherings,
I trust that you will tuck yourself
like hope, into some pocket,
to lift me, later on,
to be my dawn.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 13, 2019
All I want to do
is close my eyes
and let the images
that wait around the edges
come rushing in,
shifting and babbling
in their strange gibberish
that will focus into some kind of sense
and tell their fleeting stories
when passing through the filters of my dreams.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 28, 2019
A world made
of everything that happened,
an armature of sighs,
something seen the moment
before I opened my eyes,
not enough time
to make any difference
There may be hope
in the very slightest of things,
the gossamer of insect wings,
the care that has been taken
at every scale where things can be perceived —
we may not understand
but this may help us to believe.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 26, 2019
We rely on each other
and we let each other down
in small ways and in big ways
every day
We feel the crush of disappointment
but we keep on reaching out
because we think we have no choice.
Sometimes our efforts are rewarded,
if briefly
Our words and our intentions
go out like threads. They tangle,
they fall away. We try again
but often with the same results
We think we need each other
and we feel our need
is seldom satisfied.
We fall together unawakened
through the dream.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 17, 2018
If you’re too tired to find your daily poem,
don’t stay up late to read a novel —
its world will trespass on your dreams,
displace you from your peaceful center
Beware the morning, then, whose overcast
may not pierce through the web that spun you in —
you’ll sit in stupor trying to remember
what gives your life its lift, how to begin …
But if you find yourself in this condition,
it’s folly to succumb to doleful doubt —
you have an easy, obvious solution —
even a silly poem can pull you out.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 19, 2018