Sanctuary

This is a poem I co-wrote with a friend. We alternated lines. Then had just a little tweaking to make it fit together. And brainstormed the title.

Sanctuary

I sing love shapes onto a canvas of stillness.
Slow ripples blend outwards, overlapping
As galaxies of air expand and contract.
We are here! breathing this moment,
Lost in a timeless sanctuary
Found in formless unity,
Emptiness dancing with ineffable being.

Softly, the love shapes of my song return
As if they were the only thing I'd ever seen
and wrap themselves around me like a lullaby —
A warm blanket in winter
of velvet midnight sky.
Higher light dives into mysterious depths
Aurora borealis for my love-struck eyes.

©Chris Capogna and Wendy Mulhern

March 3, 2013

Touching Home

You fill me:

Just this time of standing,

foreheads touching,

recharges me

like water slowly filling up

a tall bottle.

I feel the strength flow in,

still knowing that I need more —

need to stand here just a bit longer,

while each moment is exactly what I need.

And when we lie stretched out

along each other,

there are other touch points

where the inrush of your essence

feeds my core.

It’s a refreshment like

swimming in the clear, bright coves

I’m only sure I’ve swum in 

in my dreams —

impossibly perfect,

inevitably pure.

So I return,

feeling the need again

to touch home —

Home to my tender soul,

Home in you.

©Wendy Mulhern

March 2, 2013

Rededication

Though I have been distracted

by all these thoughtscapes

with their shifting edges

and their treacherous crevasses —

cliff faces thrust up suddenly,

clefts and foldings that engulf

huge chunks of time —

Though I’ve been distracted by

considerations of relative fortune,

and what is given

and what is owed,

evaluations of trusts and loyalties,

and what’s conjectured

and what is known,

Today I stop,

to let my thought sink down,

steady as a stone,

to its home

where I know 

none of these thoughtscapes ever mattered —

They have no weight, no substance,

no attraction

and they can’t distract me anymore.

Today I dedicate myself again

to the pre-time worth

of everything we are,

the silent eloquence

of every vital heart,

our precious heat,

our unremitting glow.

©Wendy Mulhern

March 1, 2013

Portal Vision

I went through the portal

And now everything is different

Or maybe nothing has changed at all.

*

I see the vision

in the corner of my mind

And I can only approach it

if I treat it like a wild deer —

Don’t look straight at it,

Don’t move too fast,

Pretend to browse for food,

Go forward slowly, sideways,

Not with my attacking feet or teeth

but leading with my vulnerable side. 

It isn’t a wild deer —

It won’t bolt.

But there’s something about the focus

That won’t hold if I look straight at it.

It wants to come around me softly

And warm me from behind like sunshine —

Strong heat on the back of my ear, my shoulder

Melting my resistance.

It wants to glow behind me

And light up my path ahead,

Make a long shadow of me

to send before me like a scout.

It wants me to have this light

But always know

It doesn’t come from me.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 28, 2013

A Place of Need

How convenient it is

for me to croon about

holding angel presence

and moving out beyond a place of need

to a place where I can stand and give and heal!

How cherry-picked the role

of one whose challenges

have all been overcome,

who then can share her wisdom

to the good of all the world!

How bogus to imagine

I could somehow cease to need,

when Life has set us 

in this web of caring,

where every strand 

is tied up with the others,

so that we breathe and rise and fall together.

And I, I’ve fallen prey

to this same trap before

and laughed about it afterwards,

as if that time I'd finally

outgrown the childish tendency

and wouldn’t be so foolish anymore.

Ah! Have mercy! 

Please forgive me, be my friend —

Hold me up precisely when I’m laughable,

Keep your vision of me

based on what your wisdom holds,

Now and when I tumble here again.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 27, 2013

Moments

I find myself collecting these family times

like sunshine,

basking in the glow of evening lamps

and in the mingling sounds —

music on the radio,

dinner preparation,

the squeaking rocking chair,

and snippets from a laptop —

Drawing warmth from our collective presence.

Knowing it’s as rare

as sun is in Seattle.

calling me to cherish it the same,

Entrancing with the shimmer

of that which is ephemeral,

Gone almost before it can be named.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 25, 2013

White Noise

The page wasn’t blank from nothingness

But, like white light, white noise,

It was blank from all the disparate pursuits

that sent their separate threads across my mind,

Each tugging in a different direction:

The thread of memories and learnings

from recent days,

The thread of long exertion

sweeping needles off the roof

The thread of hopes and plans

for the not-too-distant future,

And needed tasks to make tomorrow

roll in smooth

Which all resulted

in a cancellation of the crossing waves

And the illusion of an emptiness

that really was a fullness

(and, perhaps, a need for sleep)

that kept my cogent thoughts from forming here.

©Wendy Mulhern

February 24, 2013