Poems I Love

There is a poem

in our Gratitude

in the Ancestry that is our Future

in the Presence

that fruits our past

and our passing

There is Gratitude in our

steps that find us standing still,

while our sitting down finds us

standing up

There is a poem

in the Honoring of our Grief

in the pain from which we are

no longer polarized

in our cradle that no longer

clutches for a calm,

in a torrent where we find tenderness

for tears so salty

they stream from the sea

In the Honoring of our Grief

we give as we receive

eyeing our way to the center of

the storm

and we do not hide

and we do not seek

the Stillness of this Movement

There is a poem

in our Seeing With New Eyes

where our Gaian vocabulary

loves composite words

Looktouchingsmellinghearingtasting

exists as a synesthetic prefix

to inhalexhale and a verb

for

Living

There is poem

in our infinite

dictionary

that breathes

a poetry of

symbiotic survival

There is poem

in our Going Forth

in our groundedness

that dances

in our soaring

that roots us

in our knitting that

re-weaves the web

There is a poem

in all of us

in our Work that

Reconnects.

~Bronwyn Preece

May 2010

*I dedicate this poem to Joanna Macy*

Does time, as it passes, really destroy?

Part Two, Sonnet XXVII

Does Time, as it passes, really destroy?
It may rip the fortress from its rock;
but can this heart, that belongs to God,
be torn from Him by circumstance?

Are we as fearfully fragile
as fate would have us believe?
Can we ever be severed
from childhood's deep promise?

Ah, the knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance.

We in our striving think we should last forever,
but could we be used by the Divine
if we were not ephemeral?

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing

Part One, Sonnet IV

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Quiet friend who has come so far

Part Two, Sonnet XXIX

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent Earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

The machine endangers all we have made

Part Two, Sonnet X

The Machine endangers all we have made.

We allow it to rule instead of obey.

To build a house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver's hand takes too long to feel its way.

The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it's alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.

But life holds mystery for us yet. In a hundred places
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that -- when you feel it -- brings you to your knees.

There are yet words that come near the unsayable,
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.

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