After the Competition

“The first thing you hope

is to not crash . . .

The second

is to feel you did reasonably well

So I succeeded in both of those,”

he says,

a smile escaping,

releasing a few of the

giddy little bubbles that are rising up

making him feel light.

The scores corroborate;

something shifts and settles,

and he stands more solidly.

I too feel something –

a long, slow release –

no need to worry for my son:

grow in peace.

He won’t be tilting up his head in pride,

his hair in practiced affect tossed

nor crying in a bathroom stall

his dreams in shards, his prospects lost.

He’ll walk in long-legged, languid stride

towards his desired profession

He’ll find his way in his own time

My task: maintain connection.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 30, 2011

Body Rapture

For the Turtle Dancers . . . 

Body Rapture

Let the body rapture

lead you out

beyond the tentacles of words

beyond the weights and measures of the mind

the body knows it loves, it doesn’t care

about constraints of boxes and conditions

doesn’t need permission

doesn’t need directions

has its own affection

makes its own connection

precisely tuned to every move and glance

The body rapture knows

love is pure enough to move you

in the deep perfection

of the dance.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 29, 2011

Communication

My daughter and I work with words

share phrases back and forth

shuffle clauses for clarity.

Her granddad is different.  His words

day after day, are the same —

same stories, same phrases.

Many of our words he doesn’t hear

His son says it makes little difference

even when he could hear he didn’t listen

even when he could remember

he still told the same stories.

But today

when he came home

I was digging up the garden

He said, Want me to do that?

I let him take the shovel

I steadied him

he broke up the dirt

I tossed it, with another shovel

into the pile.

He tired quickly, but joined in again soon

and we moved

in the steady language 

of working together

remembered by the body

safe from the mind’s forgetting.

We finished that job

the smooth soil

our own new story.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 28, 2011

Time Tracks

Yesterday my husband and I were walking the path around a neighborhood park, where softball games were going on, one Little League and one adult, in fancy fields with high backstops and well groomed diamonds.  I remembered a time before they remodeled the park, where I was one of a group of moms informally assembled with our kids in an impromptu pick-up game that was all about helping the kids succeed.  I was pitching, slowly, telegraphing clearly, willing the bat to connect with the ball, and it often did.  This was a game I had never played well as a child, and the kids here were also not ball players.  In that short time, sun setting in early summer evening, we all had a glow of success.  Now that scruffy, climbable backstop is gone, and the kids are mostly grown, one of them married.  And I only see the moms occasionally - years can go by between the times we casually run into each other.  This poem arose from those thoughts and images:

We move within uncomprehended rules

of what will stay and what will fall away

What’s solid ground will shift and sink, we’ll stray

No way to hedge for what we’ll win or lose

The field we played on then is gone

So, too, are all the kids we played with

We couldn’t even hold the friends we stayed with

Our life arcs intersected and moved on

Back then it seemed that we invested time

and thought one day to reap time’s golden fruit

but many never pollinated - dried on vines

of fading memories, and many lost pursuits

turn out to matter less than we had thought -

What we have now worth more than what we sought.

April 27, 2011

Bringing you down

What can dislodge you from your tree

of cool contempt, and do you need to fall

to feel connection, crashing ground to call

sharp echoes through your bones till you agree

that scornful heights are not the place to be?

No, let no crashing jar your tender bones

Instead, we’ll come with quiet, gentle hands

to wrap you in a hammock soft and grand

and bring you firmly, safely home.

For there’s no lofty place that you can climb

above the hands of Love that surely come

to every soul that’s sad, each heart that’s numb

and bring you back to your most needed rhyme

within the round of Love, in perfect time.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 26, 2011

Aftermath

It’s said, “nothing is new under the sun.”

One stupid moment — months of work undone

    Regret shrugs on a robe of anger and gets up

to storm around. Knocking down the shrines

of time together, snarling, stumbling —

hands too numb to put a thing to right

So who will save this house? What prayer

can piece together shards of broken care

can lift the tender, trampled stalks

can bind them so their heads can stand again?

Hush, hush. Lie down.  And let the bed

take over, for a time, the work you left

Surrender to the will of what compels

the roots to sprout, the seeds to lift their heads

It won’t be you who shines the rainbow through

but you will see it on your land made new.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 24, 2011

Everybody knows

the small world of everybody

has tight constraints:

what you can do

is hemmed in by

what they will think.  What you say

must fall within the ribbon of normality

and cool — that so-illusive stance

is nice, but not required.  What’s needed is

to not be weird, nor yet a type

that they can name and shame.

to be defined

outside the lines

is simply

not an option.

©Wendy Mulhern
April 24, 2011