The Thunder Gods

written during the Taurus Moon

Caught by the gods,

I am soaked, 

soaked through my skin

by the tingle of power

rippling aflame down my neural spine

and up again, wildfire in my mind

this thunder drums and drums

heartbeat thrown off kilter

a trance, pronouncement of doom, judgment come.

I crouch under the trees,

their bodies wracked by wind,

the sinew of their bark stretching, creaking, cracking

as my own body sinks to the ground, pleads, 

entreats in the soil and slime,

leaves now sewn to my skin by needles of light.

This dark light pierces me,

pours into my wells of knowing,

and the thunder keeps coming,

banging

earth shuddering as lightning hits,

a violent kiss.

In this storm, 

I do not stand tall, I do not greet the sky

or its thick tumbling clouds.

Instead I bow, pressed flat against the mud, 

limbs now tangled with roots and vines, 

splattered and dirty, impure.

I am but a creature of this earth,

a snake, belly all sinuous embrace of my utter chthonicity. 

I cannot look up, eyes filled with rain and lightning's terror.

Here in the storm, there is only blindness.

And then I feel a spark:

it rumbles, 

it shakes, 

it takes me,

until I call out to the thunder gods, 

Take me! Take me as your sacrifice! Make me into fire and flame. 

I dare now the lightning, stare it down from the sky,

its flashes destroying all illusions. 

There is a fierceness in me roaring,

rampant thunder bull with three electric eyes,

Body trembling, unfolding, muscles taut with will,

I am but string on the bow of heaven aimed at a distant peak--

The Mountain of Ten Thousand Thunders, 

they call it in their rumble speech,

those gods of the upper reaches,

no trees, no shelter, no place to hide,

only hail and wind, balefire and storm. 

Strip me down, I pray,

beat away this clay,

unveil the quartz-stone heart

until all that remains 

is a core conducting life's power

deep into Gaia's belly,

impregnating the planet anew. 

This Body: This

I didn't know her.

I met her in your arms, the way you held me down

and grabbed the wolf howl in me,

until I knew this body was sister to the moon

and all dark things that cannot be understood by light.

I sang with a whine, I sang with a moan, 

my belly made full by the power of your lust.

I met her in the fox gleam of your eyes,

a hunger that ate my heart,

the way you held my throat and turned my spine to fire,

the way I knew there was no other way to be taken,

but completely.

And then I knew her, this body,

this feral pearl fire creature,

this ocean of feeling and tidal curves, this

Thisness. 

  

   

This Body: Fleshy Cactus

This body, fleshy cactus, black-spined passion.

Touch not the flame or else be consumed,

insatiable, sucking the marrow and desert dry,

fervent lust melting will, piercing to pith 

until white sap oozes from every pore.

Taken - and taking - cutting down the spines,

no defenses here. In a pulse, 

revealing the soft watery heart, ready to surrender its bounty

to the bravest man alive.  

  

This Body, Lush Apple Blossom

This body, lush apple blossom pouring her sweetness out into the spring

Longing every moment to envelop bees, take their honeyed nectar into my pink folds.

Where is my fulfillment?

The delight of being used, filled, my petals crushed so that they seep out warm summer fragrance.

Will I ever become an apple, fattened, round, juicy and ready to drop life?

What creature will devour me, ingest me, imbibe me to his core, intoxicated?

I can't stop myself, can't stop this process of unfolding my fecund depths,

It's as inevitable as the seasons.

Then I realize:

My body is blooming

but not for you, 

not for anyone but because I can,

because I am who I am,

orchard queen seducing the world into fullness.

This Body, Full Moon Bliss

This body, full moon bliss glowing in the room. 

Shadow of sand and tide, I am awash as luminescent pearl, 

splendor seeping in to the dark watered night. 

I touch my breasts, two mountains of clam pearl light 

and feel the foam soft lushness of my pale form, 

the succulent wetness that floods in and out like a tide. 

I am white fire. I am a winter dawn come at last. 

I am this body of pale fruit flesh and redwood bark hair. 

I am the Diana of darkness, and my presence breeds life.

Rhiannon Singing

You are as one already dead.

Give yourself to me and I will sing, 

call back your shredded self from the eight corners of the underworld.

I will form you anew out of loam and leaves,

my blood your mortar,
magic-making your immortality as
the man who fell in love and lived.
 
  

The Vulture Queen

Let me be your dissolution.

Let me swallow your orgasm’s light.

Let me follow your woodsy stag scent and danger-blow cry.

Let me catch you in the night of swollen hunger,

taking you, there amidst the dark erotic soil of your soul,

Let me root, fibers piercing your thorn-ridden mountain face.

Let me devour, crack, break with teeth, rhizome, bone, snarl, and stare.

Let me love you in sharp-beaked ways,

with sweet ocean-blooded love, salivaed fangs,

with hail that beats down the green-eyed crops.

I want all that you were and are and will never be now.

Let the fear in you and the death in you be mine
and I will engulf like the sea taking back what is hers. 

Chrysemys picta

I disturb them, 

they know me first, boots squelching mud, winter twig and fern. 

How many pass this way unseeing 

as shell bellies and sun-bathed backs dissolve into empty log-in-river, 

no trace but a ripple now fading. 

I regret my trespass, 

my clumsy unskilled gait. 

Like a child out here, 

so much I don't know 

all feelings 

all scent and sight and sound— 

but thought, what use is thought in a place like this? 

This place is what it is, 

speckled foam passing and passing forever. 

From this promontory overlooking the river, 

I see I am what I am 

more bird and granite, pin oak and painted turtle 

than any law or creed. 

I sit surrounded by web, 

the chickadee chuckling at my predicament. 

He announces my place amidst dead beakrush stalk, 

igneous rock, 

river oak and river oats, sycamore and ground ivy. 

At first, I cannot see the web, and then it’s there, 

all around, sticking to me and I’m caught 

caught in the woven filaments of mind, 

invisible except by awareness' shimmer. 

But I won’t break the web. 

There’s room enough for mind out here. 

I simply let it be, let it shimmer in the wind as I sit, 

silent 

watching ripples and shadow, half light turned soft, 

as my dark reptilian self re-emerges to bask in late day sun. 

  

  

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.

  
  


 

Snow Snow Snow

My mind is full of snow.

Air turns soft with feathered light–
ten thousand stars falling to earth,
a nest of dreams in winter down,

nothing but stillness
and heart hushed with wonder.