Love speaks like this

Wait just a moment

And you can feel the love flow in

Like water on the tidal shore

seeps through the sand

melting the footprints

Let the impressions all grow wide and bright

and shimmery

While the answering rush of warmth

wells up in you

This, too, will shine —

Flash out its signal

Far across the water

to the other side.

©Wendy Mulhern

April 30, 2013

Harvesting

In this moment,

Nominally evening, 

Though bright green leaves outside

show no sign of gloaming,

In a state of pleasant tiredness

in the swing chair, swinging

I reflect that I’m delighting in a harvest.

This is harvest of a dream,

Planted more than twenty years ago

Harvest of a vision for this kind of space and peace,

Proof that things I plant as dear desires

Have their own life

That, absent any tending on my part

They still take root and grow

alongside every other hope

I may or may not notice

And bear their unassuming fruit

Which I may reap

by noting them with gratitude

Which lets me keep

with joy to which each harvest must give rise:

this blessing that now swings before my eyes.

©Wendy Mulhern

April 29, 2013

For Heather at finals time

For you to be

exactly what you are

doesn’t take a miracle

That what you are

is astoundingly perfect

in each creation, every interaction

should be no surprise

That “perfect” be defined

by the eternal laws of Life,

of seamless symbiosis, joyful thriving,

pure delight,

Makes perfect sense,

for the great source

from which we all have come

Gives us our impulse, our guidance

and our home.

©Wendy Mulhern

April 28, 2013

Through the pass

The mountain alders

In luminescent jeweled green

Have limbs much thinner than their trunks;

It is their strategy

to grow fast and high

And spread new limbs each year

Against the sky

The darker firs

still wear the garb they wore all winter

Stoically, heroically surviving —

Their springing tips come later in the year.

All along the pass

The wind turns bright leaves over

Dancing spots of white against the green

And we are voyeurs here

Flying through on the interstate

Taking in a scene that ought to cost us

far more effort.

Still it invites us

to leave our hardened corridors

Forge into mystery

And find our green.

©Wendy Mulhern

April 27, 2013

Greening

Along the ever-surging edge

of what’s alive,

There’s no time

for construction of a casing.

The growing tip is light and soft,

Ever moving into what it is becoming.

The story, the woody stem,

That which will uphold it

over future years

Will come later

in the established corridors

of nurture and support —

The long-stretched-out connection

between root and frond

But its identity,

Its form, its exaltation,

Its phototropic, geotropic

orientation,

The sensitivity, and the sensation,

Are most felt

in this newly forming green.

©Wendy Mulhern

April 26, 2013

Fluidity

From flashes in the corner of my eye

I start to sense

that what I operationally

have called reality

is completely fluid,

unanchored as water —

Which helps explain

the many times I’ve fallen through

when leaning into something

that I thought was real.

What I have called reality

is as fluid as thought

and changes just as deftly

as a dream —

Not only in the sense of what is now,

but also in my thought

of everything that’s gone before

Fluid as thought

And anchored only in the forces

that control its waves

that weave the grand and languid dance

that nothing stops —

Each impulse’s momentum

playing out its power

Nothing forgotten

in the rolling course of life.

©Wendy Mulhern

April 25, 2013

Spring Outlook

Everything has changed:

A keystone puzzle piece explaining everything,

Sun coming out bright after weeks of cold rain,

Warmth quickly filling the long-drained vessels

of human hope,

Brimming over in spontaneous smiles.

Nothing has changed:

All this time, buds were forming,

Plump potential taking shape as furled petals

Which now must open,

Green leaves growing from the draft of sweet sap

Which they make from sun

even in the fully shrouded days.

And this bright goodness —

The thing that fills me up with joy —

Why, it was here all along

The only difference is that now,

Despite all former lack of faith,

I know.

©Wendy Mulhern

April 24, 2013