IMUNURI Prompt: Harvest the Poem Garden

"Flower - Sunflower - Gardener's Toolbox" by Mike Savad

Respond to the following poem, "Seven of Pentacles" by Marge Piercy: "Weave real connections."
Extra experiential credit: While writing, put feet in the dirt. Fondle seeds. Put a harvested fruit or vegetable in your lap and breathe. Walk with a scythe. Feel the connections made. Have a pen and paper beside you. Write a poem.

remember the tags: poem, harvest, epic-earth, poet's moniker

The Seven Of Pentacles - Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

*****
An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...

SEALED BY FIRE

I have awoken as rock to our story
It's as plain as day to me
You and I have always been rock
solid, laying against each other 
as millenia move within us
birthing consciousness into body
exquisite exhalation expanding
as time breathes through us
the inner layers resonating deeply
as fire and heat conceive new form
diamond, rose quartz, jasper, gold

Our story is older than words or eyes
our veins beg us to remember
my womb cries it's earth quake
your love rocks me full
mineralizing our tongues, we kiss
upheavaling, we fold together
emerging, rising out of the waters
our ancient forms soften, smoothed
by the rich tastes of song eternal
we move our bodies toward the sun
intertwined, resting, deeply peaceful


 ~ another animista poem from my archives ~ this is what the muse offers for this prompt ~


 25 May 1997

The Prayer of the Bear

An animista poem from my archives ~ perhaps 2006

~ ~ ~

I am a Bear, like the Great Mother, she-Bear, I rise bringing body, 

blood, wonder, and a great big Heart out into this World.

I praise the Creature within me, within each of us, like this Bear,

like the Great Mother, waiting to infuse our every cell with Aliveness.

The fury that moves through these incredible bones and sinew

is the Fury that Feasts on pure Awakeness and Vibrancy of the Soul.

This Bear is awakening in me, her Wisdom moving me, gently licking 

me like her bear cub, with her huge Tongue, the heat, the Vitality of Home.

My Walk is pure when I feel the aliveness just as Aliveness, nothing more certainly 

nothing less. My great big Paws and claws tenderly scoop the Honey Nectar.

I drink, my Tongue moving deep in my Throat, being coated with the Golden

Wisdoms of Truth, Feasting on this in the Springtime of my Stirring.

I share Her Now, for She is you, for She is me, She is the Vitality of We. 

May Her Stirring wake within us, wake within you, Continue to Wake Within me.

Only Human

Jogging along a gravel road that runs along a saltmarsh
I spotted a long-billed curlew about to spear a mud crab
when a red fox suddenly intervened, wringing its gloved paws.

"Stop this madness!" it exclaimed. "I warn you, cruelty
will consume you, and your children's children
will inherit your crazed bloodlust!"

The curlew stared with minuscule eyes as cold as asteroids
then skewered the crab straight through its shell and raised it to the sky.
The fox picked up a muddy stone and hurled it, but missed.

The curlew gave thanks, consumed the crab,
then, flying toward the sun, vanished like a dream with wings.
I jogged on, indifferent to the ways of wild things.

The fox ran up beside me. "You must die," it said, "for you
have seen a thing that humans mustn't know."
It bit me in the tendon. I fell. It lunged at my bare throat.

We grappled in the mud until I managed to subdue it
by knocking it against a stump until, stunned and bleeding,
it lay quite still. "Now listen," I hissed, for I could tell

it was only playing dead  -- "You think I have no soul
because I'm Man. Well, darn it, you're wrong.
I listen to Coltrane too, just like the rest of you."

"Coltrane?" it said. "You know Coltrane?" It's eyes
grew wide with fear. "How could you - a mortal -understand?"
I whistled a bit of A Love Supreme. It wept.

I offered it my handkerchief. It blew its nose, then gave it back.
It offered me its magic boots, which I refused.
(How could I write poems with magic boots? That's cheating.)

We argued a bit. It was convinced that Coltrane wasn't Man
but was the manifestation of the soul of Wolf
descended from the heavens.

We agreed to disagree. I jogged home, scratched and bleeding.
My wife scolded me for playing with undomesticated foxes
and insisted I get rabies shots and new glasses.

I said she should listen to Coltrane more, and stop wasting her time on Facebook.
She didn't understand. How could she? She never jogs on gravel roads
and besides, she's only human.

Windkeepers

                                                           "Windkeepers"   sheet copper / Rachel L.  2013

Babble

Lauren’s told more than once

about the grossly overpriced dessert she had

that visually resembled a sewer pipe spilling muck.

The story flits to mind on a day like many others

as I walk up Sutter from where it begins

in stinking puddles in the gutters by Sees Candies.

With my walking rhythm, an air come to me from

 “that infernal nonsense Pinafore,” (a line from Penzance).

It curls into my lungs and hums me up the street.

In this becoming, I notice how all expressions

paisley out tendrillously. Le Petomane wowed

audiences in France by farting musically. Spike Milligan

referred to him and in turn inspired

the record by Elvis Costello.

I hum the song “Veronica,” in the elevator

while checking for an email from

the artist Veronica de Jesus.

I’m ten toes wriggling in a stream,

curls and eddies of earthborn creatures. We’re
prone to wild variation in our expressing—and we think

tropical birds dazzling in their dances.

All this manifestation lives, whirls...

Let’s pretend Google

is the Platonic ideal of Google

and all the marks reality expresses

are searchable, clickable to recall. There,

that’s what this is: fascination.

Human League.

snakeshining dark

she slither across.
her back: river meanders
and moving, the sound of
all-motion (leaves-in-trees not
motorcycles) a rattling
pervading, more than one

sussurrattlehissing
her time scale millenia

every freckle is a diamond on
the flecks of her smooth skin
resplendent chinks, snakeshining
endarkenwombing the moving
of her slithersloping roping

undulant earthing
grandmother of time,
planetary presence,
we know the abacus of your
snakeskin patterns count
the aeons til you reappear
ing subsume us in chordant
motion, rattle us back to
righteous balance

skeins of slain foremothers weave
her slick smooth earth-waving,
redolent of life: fecund earth blessing

when troubled, we lie down
roll bellydirtslide bellydirtslide
she is coming, soon now
sussurrattlehissing:
snakeshiningdark

Ascendary Megalith

Ascendary Megalith

beneath stone

still sound

crush

ascendary megalith

beneath soil

ever scent

terrene

mica adorned quartz

blue blush vein

throbs light smithereens

a wetted pungent slab

taste ore lapidate

salt of the earth

alkalescent

gem a quiver

palpitate echo

reverberant

lithic drum solo.

IMUNURI prompt: Animista

she say the dirt writes poems, the stones speak
she say it's all alive

write a poem from that, animista


tags: animista, epic-earth, poem, <poet's moniker>

An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...

Shadows

All morning the clouds and their mysterious shadows drifted constant as a pod of whales across the soggy hills. For hours I sat and watched and eventually stopped thinking of them as whales, imagining them instead as voluptuous brides in billowing white dresses wafting down a petal-strewn knoll, which caused me to think of honeymoons, then coastlines, romantic resorts, candlelight and sex. To get my mind off sex I thought about God, who made the world and cumulus clouds and Adam and Eve in Eden, naked and not the least ashamed, which got me thinking about sex again as the blooming clouds and their shadows flowed on and on. Then, after long silence, I heard the plane, its lonely drone, as trifling as a far off bee. I thought little of it. The clouds held my gaze. Then suddenly the airplane's shadow pounced on me from behind, enveloped me like a swift eclipse, then shot like a leopard away. A rare occurence: five or six times, at most, have I been darkened by an airplane’s shadow. One’s could measure one’s life by such unlikelihoods. Indeed, I do. Each time it happens I ponder how many foreshadowings remain. Only the shadow of an airplane could get me thinking about death on such an exquisite day.