poetry is not a luxury – Audra Lourde
For a very long time we had these strange rules around prayers…we forgot the bow at the end of a thought, the lowering of not our head, or our shoulders , but our inner being. The way a heart can break at the sound of the word, Holy or Lord. The urgency of our words when we are lost in darkness or broken by grief. How words can be tangled in territory that seems foreign, but really, home doesn’t look like that at all.
I sat outside near the pergala this morning, where the trumpet vine is greening with strength and its power to flow with tendrils over twenty feet of wood, and the cardinals came to sit near me on the yellow wicker chair. Their song blending into my skin and I could feel the beat of their hearts as prayers grew within me, touching their backs and stroking the song coming forth into the morning hours. The sun beat warmth down to the bone and the sphere of time and space slid to the side of the garden where purple salvia has grown to a foot, and all the words of prayer that flow as love from Spirit, out into the world, came like silence from the realm of one beam of light, and I heard, and I witnessed, and I prayed…where the bow meets the stillness, is where I stayed…
Beauty,
Donna Knutson
photos by Fisherman Dan @ Branford, CT
I wonder if writing this poem
will spill you out of me
through my fingertips
will the ink become your blood
this paper your skin
for me to touch
again and again?
I wonder if stretching my hands to the sky,
while standing on my tiptoes
will release you into the blue
so you can fly free with me
into the starry sky
discovering all the worlds we have inside?
I wonder if I stand as tall, and as still, as a tree
you will come to me
climb up inside me
twist your arms and legs into my branches
hold me close and sleep with me always?
I wonder if I sing you a love song
if I will become a part your soul
and a part of mine
both of us sewn within the chords
of words and notes
absorbing our crazy love
into our very dna?
Will we ever begin becoming each other?
Forever becoming each other’s other?
mirrors of beauty
dancing eternally
within the aleph
where heaven meets the earth?
🌎
AL
Prayer comes in many forms. Beauty to bless the space between.
life: acoustic & amplified 