any ordinary October
Hawk 8
I
The hawk watches over me
through a thousand miles
of sky and songs
always there
every time I glance upward
Ii
Wings spread against blue
awareness of all this
beauty, grace and goodness
following me all the days of my life
just as the promise was sung 27 years ago
Iii
Flower chaise with black and white stripe cushions
red-tile rooftop
blue water
tug boat pushes mammoth freighter
hawk circles in deep sky
Iiii
misty mountains
white veiled mysteries
shadowed hawk
colors of God hang like ragged curtains
trees crowned with falling beauty
made even more spectacular
through weathered waters
everything in life is grace
grace is everything
V
Not a big deal
Just a noticing of the guardian
flying above me
watching over
keeping my path
making my heart sing
making my burdens a little bit lighter
I am known
I am held
I am protected
Vi
11•1•8/11
the world is made
of numbers
of music
of spirals
of design
of beauty
of above
of below
of circles
of flow
of breath
of words
of love
Vii
What about the burning questions?
Who am I?
Where am I?
Why am I here?
What do I intend to do about it?
I watch you fly in silence
knowing you have more answers than I’ll ever know
I listen for your guidance
in the space between us
I sit and wait for you to open me to
everything I need to know
8
you –
being all you were born to be
named
wild
free
feathered
fearless
high
flying
comfortable
beautiful
honored
respected
protector
spirit
totem
guardian
soul
teacher
strong
🙏🏻
Amy Lloyd 2017
8 small monuments: hawk in my October journeying
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already. Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years. There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk. Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling. When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling. It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty. How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future. The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words. I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins. In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river. The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year. How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved. Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it. The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance, I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river. Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush.
🚪
10 Things I Need to Know by Richard Jackson
life: acoustic & amplified 