Well Drillers

I recognize the goodness

of your sturdy strength

and your willingness

to get completely dirty

and to muscle the heavy equipment

into the ground,

your endurance

and your experience

and the way you signal to each other

above the motor’s din and through your earplugs

and you both know

what you need to do

The joy in this shows through

like the brightness of your eyes

in mud-spattered faces,

and how you hold yourselves

after the heat of the day

and the hours of work,

fortified instead of slumped by labor.

©Wendy Mulhern

September 11, 2015

Right

I’m finished with voices

telling me to do it right

I’m finished especially with

voices telling me not to do it

because I can’t do it right

right off the bat,

such that I am left

helpless and immobilized,

waiting for someone else

to do it for me

or teach me

to do it right

For I have discovered

that if I just begin,

my action and attention

will teach me very quickly

not a rule for rightness

but the motion and awareness

that works perfectly

for right now.

©Wendy Mulhern

September 10, 2015

photo by Edward Mulhern

Fledgling

Short swoops of comprehension

give me the exhilaration of flight,

my heart filled with sky and already,

even in the breath-catching pause

after the high,

the prospect of the next rush

is forming, small,

in my mind

I don’t have to remind myself

how to do this —

just have to go out and

do it again.

©Wendy Mulhern

September 8, 2015

Building

“You almost always plant

for people coming after you,” he said.

“The trees we now enjoy 

were planted here by others,

Your vision will be seen, perhaps,

in thirty years (except for fruit trees —

they may bear in two or three)”

The things we’re building now

will be loved by others,

and maybe that’s the reason —

Maybe when that impetus is gone

and what is left is just the search

for what to do today —

what entertainment, what exotic play —

we find our colors cooling,

and the urge to live

to gradually begin to fade away

But as long as we’re impelled

to keep on building,

we’ll be living in the timelessness of love,

blessed by others who have built before us,

blessed by what we give to future years.

©Wendy Mulhern

September 6, 2015

Slow

Within the restful hush

of pre-dawn stirrings

you can feel the low tone of patient stone

that took in fall’s impassioned chill

all through the night

and now releases it

with no hurry,

equalizing the swifter emotions

of day and night

in slow perspective,

as elders view the young

with quiet humor —

nothing of heaven or tragedy

won or lost in a single day.

©Wendy Mulhern

September 4, 2015

Light Lines

In a departure

abrupt or gradual

as leaving a dream,

I grasp onto light lines

I find them in faces,

in flickers of hope,

in the never-completely-hidden

desire to be seen

I see them in the eye-catching

that perceives a sly joke

and sends cascades of laughter

into the shared space

I see you, Oh, I see you

riding strong along your current,

throwing off the crust of

who I might have thought you were

As I, too, flow out from my crust,

swifter than lava,

carrying my new form

out into the light of day.

©Wendy Mulhern

September 2, 2015

Cradle

Catch me up in the echo of wind

blowing through the dark

with the comfort of miles traversed

up along the coast and through the city,

journeys of clouds and rain bringing promise

of the year’s steady, steadying turning

Let my wistfulness, that longed

to be wrapped and held,

be cradled in this,

the purpose that works its

equalizing movement

all through the night.

©Wendy Mulhern

September 1, 2015