Here is a pearl you could wear
on a long chain, belly level,
perhaps – a truth you could use
when you need it, a secret reminder
You could remember your life
is already loved, and it doesn’t need
lies to prop it up
or fears to keep it safe
Your love is served by truth,
your truth augments your love –
they hold you in the safe place
where you know you are enough.
©Wendy Mulhern
November 7, 2021
Well, all of us have broken pieces,
all of us have memories
of things that didn’t go the way we hoped
And all of us have voices
with their diagnoses
of where things stand, given what has happened
But all of us have choices,
and they’re absolutely different
from what the voices tell us that they are
I choose
to let my love come back,
and not let it be stranded
waiting for someone to be lovable
My love knows where it comes from
and it knows to be itself. It never waits
for a precisely perfect time.
My love comes back – it’s happy to be home.
My love goes outward knowing how to shine.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 31, 2021
Let’s catch you up
in the love that has no outside,
the love that is all in,
the love that all are in
Let’s catch you up in the love
that has no cavity,
no void – we can dance
in the honeyed light of fearlessness
since all our here is cherished
Let’s catch you up in celebration,
sing your name in joy,
share this sweet belonging
till all our sorrow’s gone.
©Wendy Mulhern
October 27, 2021
Thirty-nine years, and I’m only just
coming to know you.
Fair enough to say I’m only just
coming to know myself
Before that, we were playing house,
impressing ourselves
with all that we knew,
many times confident,
many times feeling adrift
And then the storms came,
and for years, we were soldiering through,
pulling together but feeling alone,
traversing aloneness together
Now there is now, and I hesitate
to say too much. There is wonder
in what we are living out,
day after day, and there’s promise,
and the impulse to keep the page
open, and empty,
until it is written each day.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 25, 2021
We walk in the smile of the day,
feet touching down along its curve.
Songbirds and crickets,
turkey and deer –
all the usual inhabitants –
move in the same grace
We revel in crescents –
the arc of temperature,
the waxing moon,
the hammock of tenderness
we offer each other
during and after
the easy swing of the day’s work.
©Wendy Mulhern
September 11, 2021
And if we come to find ourselves
soiled beyond all recognition,
bound and twisted
by the world’s oppressive logic
If we feel betrayed, bamboozled,
bankrupt, if we feel the huge mistakes
we’ve made were baked in, embedded
in the vast array of lies that we grew up with –
that is good news. It shows us separating
from what we thought we were,
and, following the feelings down,
we’ll find ourselves,
ready and able to be clean
For starters, we can wash each other,
bathe each other in forgiveness,
use the vision of what we are
to see the same in them,
let their clear sight of us
help set us free.
©Wendy Mulhern
August 19, 2021
There is so much for me
when I remember to see you
unbound from any demographic,
when I turn off that which catalogs
and compares,
and recognize, instead,
the spirit in you – your energy,
your brightness, your appreciation,
and the tender place between your shoulders
where your uniqueness rests like wings.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 22, 2021
It turned out that I, too,
was able to cash in the chip,
was able to fall into the thought
that transcended the problem entirely
In my mind I could see you washed clean –
not needing reform, not needing
torturous penance to pay
And none of the tokens
I may have had stashed,
none of the tallies of wrongs to be righted,
needed to be redeemed –
they were gone –
the great hole where they had been
was filled with light
I was silent for a long time
pondering this,
feeling the space within me
so much larger
than I ever thought I was.
©Wendy Mulhern
July 3, 2021
I”m looking for a way to be home,
looking for a way to love that won’t fail,
seeking to wean myself from stories
of the quick flicker and mysterious arc
of love – how it can flame and crash
or just be gone
I know that love has never been like that –
when it touched into the stories,
it brought a power with it
that no story could sustain,
contain, retain, restrain –
and so I’m seeking love
outside of stories,
the love that, when they’re done,
will still remain.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 28, 2021
Love illumines you.
Understand this:
follow the pulse of your being
all the way down
to what wants to be –
what wants to be seen,
what wants to be known,
what hungers to find its expression
Love illumines you
way down to the core –
love is what courses
underneath everything,
spurring your very existence
Love illumines you
from the inside,
the only light you can see by,
the light by which you are seen –
look how it shines you up
right through whatever else
you may have thought had to be
Look how it shows you are
everything that you are,
right through what others might see,
right to the place you are free.
©Wendy Mulhern
June 21, 2021