a gathering of threads

poetry, prose, and word fragments | all content is my own | main blog @flowingrooted 

[agatheringofthreads]

Pomegranate

The sky is pomegranate red at sunset.

A wayward cloud shaped like an arrow pierces the fruit and the juice drips secrets down into vessels, into valleys, into all the fields and oceans.

Clouds gather. Tides roll in. I watch from the shore, shifting with the sand, asking for my place in all of this.

The roots of trees respond to me:

Be honored. You are witness. You are watered by the storms you’ve weathered. You are lifted by the winds and you dance. You sing. You journey and return. You are pulsing, a complex system intertwining, yet a still and simple thing of nature. You are many things and many ways at many times and many places, and always through it all you are witness. There is nothing more precious you can be than that which you are.

I listen to the rustle of the wild blooms that sprout from my limbs and face and heart and everywhere, and I know that the roots speak true.

I gather the seedlings that the breeze plucks off my petals and onward, with an armful of hope, I flow.

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Gather your scattered pieces. Lean them against one another and let the shape they make shelter you.

Not too much, for those wings you have are much too wide and eager to fly — but just enough to come home to.

Bring back the things you find and layer them over the foundation. This is how you will live inside yourself without becoming trapped there.

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spine

straighten up. i am tired of carrying what does not need to be carried.

i hear a song and i want to dance you along the current of melody – won’t you let me?

i’ve become weary of sustaining the chaos; there is music and lightness    twirling spinning cascade brightness

consider for a moment the weight i bear has overstayed its welcome

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seeping in everywhere, a spirit-deep craving for Time: precious tool that might forge motion beyond this wall of scarcity

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resilience is a vine, tendrils always reaching lusciously toward the sun "an invincible summer"

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hearts jumping into throats winged, emerging from cocoons

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i woke up missing a self that had gone when you left,

holding your hand, small child still needing shelter from the sinking doubt

of later years and yet, memory fails me when i try

to recall what protection felt like; maybe i was never sheltered, not

in the way that feels safe — though certainly in the way that

feels smothering and hot, suffocating in a space too small, too filled

with useless material weight to encourage little wings to spread as wide

as the sky the eyes of the heart have always so loved

i don’t remember much that sends any warmth traveling through the core

just blankness, silent knowing that once i was a child and once

i had a childhood but that suddenly, time flew away and my

little wings could not keep up without room for them to unfold

and i do not know the self that i woke up missing

or the hand she was still trying to hold

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I, too, am the unexpected, the secret passage, the shining sea — coming, going, open-ended.

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walking at sunset without a camera

she swings inside a small house of time we found this evening

the clouds leak out the window; i am called to simplicity’s side

to live here, within this moment’s short shelter for a bit, appreciating

a space where everything takes care of itself for a change, and

all the beauty to be captured instead moves through, floats onward, free

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Moments swing open, invitations to arrive.

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i am fire, an abstraction, watercolor splashes on an open canvas with every breath, an expansion with every sigh, a release and all the light and color in the spaces in between

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Staying

The heart is a labyrinth, a tempest, a secret, a grove.

Small shoots greeting cool air for the first time, sharing space

with towering trees who don’t think twice about which way to turn

next. They are already home, right where they were born.

Oh, to possess that courage: to find freedom in staying, to grow

straight up to the heavens, to sprout defiantly, to claim however small

a space as your own, to live right in the middle of

the maze without the urge to run.

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listen: movement and stillness both speak. they speak of old days made new by shifting scenery, by quiet pockets of time and space that change the fabric of memory.

listen: the moth and the moon both speak. they speak of flame and fluidity, of short lives lived long and curiously.

listen: to every piece a story.

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Empty Spaces

All of this charred woodland emptiness. Soon they will be clearings, a different sort of empty. The sort that is a promise.

Sprouting small wild things that will rise in days to come and invite creatures to claim sanctuary where before there was none.

And when the sun sets and beams fading light through the trees in slanted lines the empty spaces will look just like magic, a garden, a dream —

and you will not forget that there was death here, but you will not forget the life, either.

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Capricorn

Sometimes I imagine that in the end, at the peak of the mountain, I shall enjoy only my own company,

quiet serenity. Gentle breeze stirring draping fabrics. A sunlit morning. Grecian blues and ivories. Shimmering azure valley down below.

Such quiescence that has swallowed me whole and taught me intimacy. Such grandiose melancholy that has also lent me my astonishing capacity for bliss —

Sometimes I imagine this is how I should like to end my story. Heartful and anticipatory, alone with my desires, in the most magnificent way. Dancing with the wind that skirts the clifftop until scattering into it, becoming

something new. I will forget everything I wanted and start again.

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Something hides in the belly, squirms for freedom without knowing the word. It escapes language, time, anything that could give it a presence. Yet it wants only to be seen, heard, taken in like flowers drink the sunlight. I don't know how to pull it from its shapeless prison into the warm, open air. Perhaps we both are caged.

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I've overpacked again. The sunlight and the shade are fighting for space on the asphalt, and we are almost done with our winding drive up the mountain. My stomach turns at the thought of carrying out all the bags.

It is like that with unnecessary weight: heavy before you even lift it. A settling in your bones, a resignation to belonging to the things you thought you'd need and now wish to leave behind. A silent, powerless agreement to honoring a contract you forgot you never signed. It is why, when Aldous Huxley said we must go lightly, I agreed.