We were going down the mountain
you had taken your shoes off
walking through streams
I was running to catch up with you
the light was soft
the landscape fuzzy
as it often is in dreams
the path was longer
than we’d anticipated
it was an hour before dark
but we weren’t worried –
Dad could come with the car
and rescue us
or we could wake up –
it would come out
to the same thing.
©Wendy Mulhern
February 10, 2021
My song sparrow, my thrush, my swallow,
May your sweet voice carry on the wind,
May you swoop in sheer delight
in concert with your kin
Since you took off, I’ve been trudging up this path,
Sometimes caught up in overwhelming beauty,
Often looking down and thinking it should be so easy
to just leap off and fly among these vistas
But I walk – there’s plenty here,
and nothing else to do but keep on climbing –
One of these days I’ll catch the peak
and then we’ll see you maybe –
in that transfigured place where you have flown.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 7, 2020
I envision you
welcomed into light,
welcomed home,
seen
in a lucidity and depth
you’d never known before
I feel you soften,
relax into the comfort and the confidence,
bask in recognition and appreciation,
and in the pleasure
of delighting all your company
I see you there
because each day
I feel a little closer to it –
as I approach this truth,
day by day, I feel
closer, too, to you.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 13, 2020
I find myself thinking of you,
spending my day wrapped in memory –
so many lenses to use
Each lens makes it different,
shades of the moods and the color
calling forth different scenes
All of these memories
still would be mine
no matter how things had come out
How I would view them
had things come out otherwise
isn’t a thing I could know
But the way that I knew you
shines clear, steps out strong,
leaves my clouded perceptions behind
How I knew you true then
is how I know you now, –
friend of my heart and my mind.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 11, 2020
Because you came to me
in a dream, you have me asking,
What of you do I know?
And what do I know of anyone?
This dream appearance –
the way you laughed, subtle
irony in your observations –
where does it reside
that I should know it –
Where are you now?
And what does where mean, anyway,
in the everywhere of thought,
the every here of presence?
What will our knowing be,
when freed of time and space?
For this my daily practice strives
to find, each day, a little taste.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 24, 2020
In the instant vision
I saw the way your touch
took its place
in the work of restoring
the radiating order —
how it gave everyone
a key thing they needed
to relax in inner peace
and look up
I saw it as a token
for how we each
will find our place
and fill in the grand design.
Broken filaments will twine themselves
back together
and the whole world
will light up.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 4, 2020
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’m imagining us, not too long hence,
walking hand in hand
though in the vision
it’s more like streaming light,
all of us grateful
to have been brought together
I imagine us streaming like that
all the time — then I consider
you will have others, too,
others to share and celebrate
and so will we
and the whole thing
will be so much grander
than I can think up
So I’ll just bask in the warmth of it,
how it comforts me and holds me up
right here and now.
©Wendy Mulhern
March 10, 2019
I have a bag of tears
somewhere in my head,
I feel it jiggle with the bumps along the road,
maybe I’ll take it out
and drink some down,
water my memories
Oh my sweetest love,
I miss you in my future,
I miss your presence, too.
The water comes and takes away my footprints,
something like that sometime may take me, too
I found a feather
amidst my sobs along the sand,
so small and perfect —
I smoothed it with my hand,
and as I always do
I had to take it for a sign
I had to listen for your presence in my mind
“Didn’t I show you?” you said —
I answered, “yes, you did.”
“Then you will take to heart
that light-filled vision.
Your heaviness is like those clumps of snow
disappearing, dense because they’re melting.
“Take that feather
and learn to fly sometime,
get ready
to leave it all behind,
not that you’re going anywhere,
just being redefined —
that’s how I’ll see you on the other side.”
©Wendy Mulhern
February 21, 2019
In the end we will find
we have not been betrayed
by our choices. We won’t come to wish
we had known better
and done something else,
even when vast scenarios
play themselves out — if only …
Our coming into ourselves
is not a matter of chance,
of choice, any more than is
the river’s course
or the return of waves
back along their cycle at the shore
We’ll meet again — I’m certain —
We’ll celebrate the beauty of our lives,
the tender light we each shed
on the world and on each other
in every place where we were meant to shine,
undimmed by how we dipped our threads through time.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 24, 2019