Anam Cara (Soul Lover)

Image: Howard Sokol*

 

 

to friendship and my dearest friends

 

Here with you now

I am aware of the space between us

and the gentle river of words and gestures that fill that space with love.

You are like soft autumn rain seeping down into the meadows of my soul,

lush with delight, a great open field of freedom

rushing down to the sea under stars.

  

It is here I meet you,

as you are, as I am,

our bodies like bowls resonating in the night,

sounding out our recognition,

echoes of some other destiny once partook together.  

  

We are two weary pilgrims at rest for a time,

stretched out in the grass with dew and dirt,

beach below and the receding surf reminding us that

somewhere in primordial memory,

your grain of sand and mine lay nestled next to each other.

And now in this eon of lifetimes beyond the original clay,

we feel the same sense of next-togetherness

deep in our bones and breath and blood,

bound together by water and fire and the bond of human spirit.

Our journey is long, roads into darkness and unknown dreams.

But we wander on in the womb of the world

to be polished from sand into pearl.

One day our jeweled selves will shine forth.

One day we will lie side by side again as we do now,

strung on a cosmic necklace of stars,

the constellation of our love made more brilliant

by lifetimes of travel apart. 

*

 

http://www.howardsokolphotography.com/

Symbiosis

Come, Symbiosis! 
Come, evolutionary lightning!
Strike our counterpoint and set free the cosmic tide,
carried forth by waves of void
back to the center,
back where being is unmade and remade anew.
What new designs, systems, and laws will you birth
from the black-holed Madonna?
All is destroyed.
All is recycled
and lives on through You.

Cancerian Prayer

River of Life,
Wear away my flesh until spirals of love emerge.
Carve into this skin the tides of no-mind
until stone I am no more.
Dissolved, dissipated, sand dispersed to sea,
I return to feed the forms.

Red Mountain Mind

Red your pine needles, your rusty clay and woodpeckers,
Red the dawn about your head, and squirrels who sleep in hollow beds.
Red the river with your mud, tinged with blue, green, brown and gold.
Red your ants, emboldened by flesh, and red your buds in spring's first blush.
Red the cardinal, mulberries, raspberries, blackberries, holly and red maple, red oak, rhodedendron.

Red too am I, rolling in mud and water, hair like flame, and skin now re-formed with your own.

You call to me through creaking trunk and woodland scent:
"Sink back into the mud
back into pine needles and redbird song.
A new clothing fashion from
dust and feathers, twigs and elderberries."

I will don Red Mountain as it dons me,
but a thread of thought in the mind of its song.

Woven, re-patterned,
my mouth becomes beak and eyes like a fox,
two antlers grow from a sharpened brain
as mud dries into skin bark, textured, all curves,
with tree knobs and boles for knees and elbows,
and this heart, now quartz stone
purified, pressed into form by the weight of 6.5 billion years
and the great river of time that wears away at the universe
like water carves canyons, caves, new creatures,

pooling deep in the cosmic belly,
it carries the seeds of life,
erosion of dreams now scattered to the winds,
impregnating the darkness like embers or stars,
galaxies fed by the compost of planets and long dead suns,
recycled, reborn, as tree, rock, snout and smile.

Human too, more stardust and water than creed or law.
Red mud for blood, these Homo sapien creatures.

Sun carries me back
back to Red Mountain.
Woodpecker overhead, drumming on my mind,
a resonant bowl for the wind

as thought drops to earth, an autumn leaf,
red blood turned purple, deep maroon, black,
feeding the soil of all that lives in the world.

The Old Traditions

Ireland Speaks of Tradition

Burn these traditions, O Fire!

May Medb and Deirdre, Grainne and Lugh, 

Amergin and Brid, Padraig and Colm Cille,

burn like a pyre boat sent to sea. 

Love not the old traditions but Tradition.

Rivers dry up. Springs empty.

But the Well of Life overflows!

Let the old groves decompose, the old stones dissolve.

Give over Newgrange and Tara, Emain Macha and Knocknarea.

They are but soil long borrowed from my heart, ready to reincarnate anew. 

Eireann's Lovers

Ireland Sings To Her Emigrants:

I am lovesick.
My fields are empty with sorrow
and my wealth dissipates with depression.
No laughing children fill my woods.
They are all gone out into the world.

But I am a woman in love!
And her lovers have turned away.
Return from the far off lands
to me, your ain true love.

Hag no more, I am young,
my breasts as firm as mountain hills
my valley as wet as the Boyne
my hair is soft and long and sweet
and my lips are red with lust.

I am a woman crying out to be loved:
Love me! Love me! Oh love me!
It is the hooded owl's night-call,
refusing to be ignored in the dark.

Come back to your childhood home
where we played outside time or care.
I was a bird and you my song,
laughter raised to the seven heavens.

Re-enter my pleasant lands:
they are fragrant with meadowsweet and gorse,
elderflower, hawthorn and wild rose.

I have prepared a bed for our lovemaking.
It is strewn with petals and grasses and silk,
out on the hills amidst the heather.

There I will reveal to you the secrets of power
best learned from a woman's hot thighs.

Forget the old stories and traditions!
They are not who I am today.
You were in love with a different woman.

Lie with me instead,
my soul spread naked before you.
In that embrace, we will make a new mythology of love.

Kiss me hard on the mouth,
and from our pillow I will whisper a new tradition for life.

Dwell with me
See me as I am

not your mother or grandmother
not Maeve or Grainne or Deirdre,
although I have been all of those and more

but see me without projection:
a small fair woman,
island unto herself
but sister to the world,
fierce and independent
yet vulnerable, lovelorn, battle-weary.

I have claimed my power anew,
sexuality, sovereignty, my soul,
seeking out new priests for the religion of love
and new politicians for the freedom of life.

Now penetrate my depths!
Let us make sighs of fulfillment together,
let everything burn away in passion's fire,
let nothing remain but you and I
and the love between a land and her people.

  

  

Autopoiesis

The Cailleach Speaks Her Mind

Hag no longer hostage,
I dance
naked hailstone
electric emerald heart
lightning struck down to ground
as hill and mountain crack,
thunder rending apart.

Exposed am I, revealed!
Vagina the opened mound,
burial tomb no more
but black earth womb.

Oh Life, fuck me and fuck me deep.
Make love to your lover, the land.
Penetrate your power to my core.

I am wet as the rain for you,
heavy as the clouds for you,
aching as the wind for you,

and demand your ravaging fire
strike open stone into soil,
hail hag no more, but girl queen

priestess in a new fertility rite
where I stand, the Self-Regenerating One.
  

   

The Salmon Soul Speaks

 written from the spring of Life that flows through Ireland as a river of Love

I will live as a river flows,
carried by the delight of my own unfolding.
I will swim the milky Way of Love
out to sea and back again.
Salmon in cycle, my soul,
soul as return, river, rebirth
into the matter of spirit --
unfettered
bursting banks
clearing the land
shaping stone into star
and egg into fire.
I am the current of GOD that remains
ever changing but ever unchanged. 

   

Eno River Walking: Visual Verse

Please click on the image above to enjoy a ~10 minute "visual verse video" I've put together which includes my own photography of the Eno River and local area, as well as myself reading my "Eno River Walking" poem. Enjoy and let me know your thoughts!

    

Magicicada tredecim

In the thirteenth year they came,

fat caramel bodies tymbolling at noon, 

one month to molt, mate, birth and die.

Summer arrives from under ground.

This brood of lovers

like lightning discharged through a storm of sound.
  

Vibrant cicada hum, lust without shame:
so too my heart hums, a low throaty tune,
and feels the sky's reverberant reply.

Hydrologic Dao

O River--
our lives are but seeds on your tide,
born away on the Pathless Path
from mountains to sea
     and back again,
reincarnated as rain.