Signs of a day well spent
rest on my eyes and cheekbones –
more than the gift of warming sun
and cooling wind, and work outside,
this sense of symphony
(haunting sweetness of the oboe,
deft arpeggiation branching through the strings)
surrounds us in a hallowed circle
All is well, and all is held
safe in the hand of harmony –
we live our lives as prayer and art
and work and joy and play.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 16, 2023
Here at the feet of the breath and the rhythm,
breath of calm centering,
rhythm of thought,
focused attention and time to reflect on
the lessons that listening brought
Depth of the peacefulness,
scope of the harmony,
place where the stillness is heard,
fast tempo chatter, empty or passionate,
silenced inside of the Word.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 16, 2023
With my heart I follow
the blades of grass
down to their still points –
each one has a center,
each is individual,
so none become displaced,
though waves of wind sweep over,
bending them silver red green gold
in turn, though they bow in sequence,
then spring back –
each one has its anchor in the ground,
each its source of nutrient,
each its place in the land
to rise up into everything it is
and shimmer the collective dance.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 23, 2022
The rooms of this house –
I consecrate them –
Let them be fully filled
with harmony. Let the rhythm
of Soul so saturate the spaces
that everything within reverberates
This is a house of justice,
so all who enter here
are seen for what they truly are.
There is no frequency here
for false representation –
it finds no chord and so is left in silence
And even if your truest tone
has so far never sounded,
it will ring out here,
so true are the harmonics –
if you didn’t know before,
you will know now,
and so will all the dwellers
in the house.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 9, 2021
Someone once told me that harmony
was first about furniture making –
the fitting and shaping of wood,
the fine joinery
making each piece come together
And that it was metaphor making the link
to that which is found in sweet music,
and people’s relations of joy and not friction
that all of us crave in our souls
Which doesn’t explain
why working with wood
through the course of these last few days
has cleared my head fully
of all thoughts of poetry,
left me with nothing to say.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 17, 2021
There was space in the morning
to allow
for the tiniest of yellow flowers
to open
just half way – a trumpet bell on a stem
And space, in that tiny harmony
to account
for all the interweavings, subterranean
and above,
all the ideas that had to be here first
for all this to unfold,
from the smallest to the largest
All of this
had to be known,
and this is our gift,
that we are the knowing.
This we are given,
and this we give, in turn.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 22, 2021
Thank you for the fullness of the day –
full, in forward progress and in
cheerful sharing of the work,
and working out the problems,
heads and hands close together
Full in feasts of beauty
presented by the land,
and coziness of fire-warmed space
and warmth of smiles
Full, finally, in that great vision
of the harmony that holds us
and its tangible fruition
in unasked for grace
I’ve been a long time approaching
this starting place,
now finding myself,
wonderingly,
already here.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 6, 2021
It’s not about being right,
it’s not about winning
The omni-directionality
of the converging chorus
overcomes, with its sheer beauty,
any operatic sense
For you’ll find
you’d rather be part of it
than be exalted on your own –
you’d rather be an unnamed conduit
of this transforming light
than to be spotlighted,
called out as a star
You’d rather know
someone went home
feeling filled with brightness
and shared it with their family
and they all felt
delighted in and blessed
You’d rather know
this light is the current
that keeps everything going,
just as it always has
and always will.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 19, 2021
The perfect fitting of things
is not mechanical,
though we may observe
the intricate meshings,
though we may think
it’s a fragile webbing –
one strand misplaced
and all could fall away,
one beat missed
and everything could crash
But it can’t, it won’t.
It’s not mechanical.
No one thing depends upon another,
though it seems to.
This is the breath of Life,
everything moving in one Spirit,
each one bound
in deepest love,
directly to its cause.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 27, 2020
You wake up and remember
what you know —
you may have to reach for it,
coming up from dream,
batting back the thoughts
that fall on you
as you break the surface
You may have to spend more time,
may need to diligently focus,
but it comes in — new each morning,
different from yesterday,
full of its own promise
Sometimes it’s a steady fire within,
able to incinerate anything untrue,
sometimes it’s a sunrise seen afar,
overwhelming with its gift of beauty
And sometimes the old lines
of you and me, us and them,
are totally confounded
in the unity of Mind’s purpose,
working out the calculus
of universal good.
©Wendy Mulhern
December 7, 2019