My poems often feel like prayer. Erupting from a space deep within myself, almost fully formed. It is a remarkable sensation. I do not fish, yet somehow I know that this feeling is akin to a bite on the hook. The gentle tug and dance, and then voila! I meal is in your lap. My poems feel like food, soul food. They sustain me.
I’ve been spending as much time as I can out in this beautiful world. Looking for food, watching the birds and immersing myself in my landscape. I love this place I live. I love seeing the plants return, greeting them as old friends. I may in fact have been chatting with the Camas I saw last Friday night as bewildered walkers past by on the trail just behind me. Spring is incredible to me every year. Life is just so impossibly beautiful.
It has been hard for me to go to work. I want only to be free, in the wild, on the soil, tasting life. This poem, or prayer, came to me on my drive to work as I struggled with the desire to just keep driving. Past the confines of the city, past the constructs that hold this system together. And into what feels to me like the only true thing. Natures teaching.
Foragers Prayer
This is a day to slip my leash
lose my shoes
Move soft footed through the wooded hills
Green calls my name
the sun is dancing just for me
All is beauty
so alive it makes my skin ache
I want to bathe in this
Roll in it, let the dew soak through my clothes
I want to eat it
Green in my mouth
Pungent, bitter,wild
It is all too much to bear
my heart beats a rhythm
A deep sweet pounding
this wonder of spring
let it pierce me, consume me
green growing from my heart
Tendrils twining round my ribs
Petals unfurling in the iris of my eyes
I am in love
And I am love
Nature grows
and grows me
blooms in my heart
and calls me home
to Her
Beautiful. I feel the same way. Our main season is just starting to pick up. So excited.
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I know that feeling of waiting and excitement!! Happy foraging to you!! Let me know what you start gathering! So fun for me to connect with you and hear what’s happing on the land where you are.
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Spring
Forsythia with its
Yellow spring flowers on
Wet ground.
Gray billows of clouds move
Across rainbowed skys.
Spring of the year
Impatience, freshening
Opening, impatience.
Salamanders sleeping
In wet leaved coolness
Stirring.
Delison 2016
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I love this poem Hank. I feel the love you and I share for the natural world in your words.
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