Clouds with a purpose
make their way across the hills,
leaning in to their destination,
companionable in their quantity
Tousled daisies tell the news
to each other in little flurries
of excitement,
(I keep taking my jacket off
and putting it on)
It may rain
We may abandon our work, or,
having no excuse, we may continue —
We are working easy today,
our hands not minding
the halting pace of our minds.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 13, 2016
Each step we take is tiny.
There is, it seems, extreme effort
to any thing we can say in a sentence
that we did —
It’s astonishing
we don’t accomplish more
Yet we find a sense of owning, of tending,
that grows as if without our efforts —
I feel the land responding,
settling in to trusting us,
moving, generous, to aid
the things we’ve planned
Grand things will happen,
but it’s good to know
we are already here.
©Wendy Mulhern
April 16, 2016
Go easy with the plans.
Grand plans can crash
through the fragile screens
of our connections, the web
with which we anchor our experience.
They can crash through
the wispy wefts of imagination,
the ones we use to build our vision
There is a place to plan big,
but then we must come quickly down,
for seedlings have different needs
from saplings, which have different
roles from trees,
and fruition requires
many conditions
to come about
You can imagine an orchard and a harvest
in an instant
but how to make it grow
robust through all its stages,
through the years —
more than big plans,
that is what we need.
©Wendy Mulhern
August 9, 2015
Now and again in flashes
I get this image:
My foot touching ground
for the first time,
the knowledge of contact
flowing back into me
up the curve of my calf,
my knee,
I feel its echo down my arm
as if my arm had never
up till now
been really here
And I sense
that this discovery
is what I have always needed
to move with power in the world,
to be whole.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 5, 2015
The sun scorches us
The wind dries us
We only notice on the edges
of our work and our wonder
The brambles trip and prick us,
Some insects bite —
We carry all these things
with a nascent understanding
of how we are owned by this land
and how our love emerges
as we are eroded,
how in this weathering
we become capable,
in this honing
we become something different —
More of the earth, less of the city,
closer to both the land and the sky.
©Wendy Mulhern
May 3, 2015