Defending Innocence

I stand here afterwards,

a bit bewildered —

The flames haven’t hurt me

and the smoke is clearing,

and it wasn’t exactly a battle . . .

I took a stand for innocence,

and it came under fire,

but what got singed was just

the guilty part I held within.

Unaltered was the call

to stand for innocence

and let no rising voice,

indignant, shocked, alarmed,

deflect my steady sight

of innocence inviolate —

every person’s right.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 8, 2013

Cold Snap

Now we’re here

and what we thought we’d do

has been subsumed 

by all the day’s particulars —

the cold,

the sun’s low angle

(bleak, oblique, but warming through the glass,)

the newly rising urgencies

and their disjointed rhythms —

times of waiting spaced between demanding tasks —

So we stay home

and move within the small circles,

try to settle in,

protect the center.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 7, 2013

Winter’s Onset/Inner Warmth

Warmed from the inside

by radiant heat,

I feel the pleasant boundary

of my skin,

a rosy presence,

the satisfaction of being

soundly grounded in a place.

It’s cold outside

but that coldness is no match 

for inner warmth

that glows here

even brighter than the fire.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 6, 2013

Arguing the Case

I need not plead for you

in the court of nightmares,

masking with bravado

a trembling sense

of being at the mercy of its sentences,

implacable, arbitrary, cruel.

I’ll take your case

to the light of day

where all those looming shadows

are revealed as two-dimensional —

lying flat along the ground

and bending with the walls,

insubstantial, fleeting as the hours —

For you were never subject

to the tales of failure,

never marred by the projections

of a bad light.

You have always stood empowered

in the grandeur of the genius

that ever brings you forth

intact, upright.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 5, 2013

Transfiguration

It is good for us to be here,

and whatever we have brought —

our child fears, our defenses,

our adult masks, our opinions,

the scaffolding on which we’ve propped

our wobbly sense of worth —

Whatever we have brought

can sit here in this light

of what we’ve glimpsed within each other.

It can sit in that warmth,

bask in the slowly suffusing fact

that it’s forgiven. All of it.

We will fill with light till that’s all

we can see in each other,

and we will be whole.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 4, 2013

There’s time

Don’t worry —

Time won’t go without you.

We are the time-makers —

we breathe time,

it moves at our fiat.

Every one of us

has the power to insist

that time unfold in order,

allowing space for each expression

to come to full fruition,

each impulse to bring forth

all the blessing that impelled it,

each symphonic movement 

to build,

in its proper sequence,

to the place of final satisfaction.

Life doesn’t go without you —

there’s time.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 2, 2013

The affluence of forgiveness

It doesn’t matter

how big, how horrible

the lie told about you.

It doesn’t matter

how often it was told,

or for how long,

or who believed it,

or even if you, too, were fooled.

It doesn’t matter

how it has accumulated,

what complications got piled up

and up, compounding that first lie,

it doesn’t matter

what consequences have accrued.

In the clarity of Truth

no lie is seen,

and in the sight of Truth

is the forgiveness

that absolves any size lie

and makes you clean.

©Wendy Mulhern

December 1, 2013