OSI Prompt #55: Farewell

This week, my daughter and I have been working to clean out the beloved house we called home for 31 years. We made the difficult decision to prepare it for sale. So this week's prompt is timely.

Scrubbing windows in

this empty winter house,

memories echo here,

music, laughter, tears -

let the blessed light in!

Bare old plum tree

through the bedroom window,

split so deep now --

will you bloom again?

Closing my eyes, I see

your spring blossoms, white petals

pirouetting down,

chickadees nesting in the hole

under your precarious branch --

the one my grandfather trimmed

and patched so many years ago

Late summer, mouth and

baskets full of yellow plums,

then copper and gold leaves

litter the ground, stars appear

like Christmas lights in your branches

One moonlit snowy

night, two fawns, two does appear;

ears upright, eyes bright,

standing beneath your branches -

I held my breath!

OSI - Prompt #54: Fork in the Road

The good road, and the

road of difficulties cross;

that place is holy

Holy is the place

we begin again in the

broken heart of now

Now stepping on an

unknown path, seeking only

to be whole again

Do you sometimes encounter ideas that hit you with such force that they immediately penetrate your psyche and become part of the fabric of how you see the world? Perhaps even become a kind of spiritual talisman that you return to again and again? This week's prompt brought to mind two such ideas for me. The first was revealed to me in a prayer spoken by the Ogala Sioux medicine man, Black Elk, in Black Elk Speaks, by John Neihardt (paraphrased in the first stanza.) The idea that when we come to a place in our lives where we are faced with this kind of soul-compelling choice -- that it is a holy place --has stayed with me all my life. The second talismanic idea attached itself to this one, and came when I learned that the words 'whole', 'healing', and 'holy' all share a common Sanscrit root.

OSI Prompt 53: Circles

Happy 1st Anniversary OSI! Here is an older piece, written nearly 14 years ago, the night before the birth of my first grandchild. My daughter had already named her, Sequoia. I presented this poem to her on her 13th birthday last summer, as part of a 'coming of age' collection of writings that my daughter put together for her.

To Sequoia, under the Full Moon

Standing now

as I did then, window-framed,

body carved in moonlight,

soul lit with wonder --

Then, at the edge of my girlhood,

unspoken, unseen, unimagined possibility

beginning to dawn within.

Full moon floods the sky tonight,

blanketing now

child of my womb --

womb-full,

ripe now, ready to begin

a new circle.

Now, on the eve

of my grand-mothering -- this too

unknown, unimagined possibility,

this grandmother body

still encircling (not enclosing) my own babe,

her womb full of potentiality,

reality, already named (before the dawn)

Sequoia ('close to God')...

I am woman,

now under the full moon

womb full of wonder,

grandmother to be.