I Am Learning How to Be a Flower by Dominque Christina Ashaheed

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There is a wisdom that you can claim.
It rumbles and shimmies in your belly.
Low and deep, it is an old and familiar knowing.
A railroad of long ago yesterdays asking us to remember the typography of our souls.
Our own inspired light.
I swallowed a Lilly once and heard the laughter I had been denying.
There are so many songs waiting on the garden of your belly to be given permission to grow.
Who told us to shut out our own indomitable light?
Our own remarkable song.
There is a universe in my body.
I wake some nights the constellation of stars settling deep behind my eyelids
Our memories are older than we are.
We are born into so many stories.
So many ways of knowing.
A long sigh of yesterdays without formal introductions.
But, I am learning how to be a flower.
How to remember my body.
How to commit to her regeneration
How to reassemble these bones into star-shine.
I am learning how to love like lavender.
Stretching out around the sun
until we are singing the same insistent melodies
I am hearing my own voice again.
Becoming a wider girl.
You want to know who I am?
I’m wind-song.
Many mountains moving a rain cloud.
A midnight sigh.
A forest.
An old story.
A new song.
A pink and possible thing.
Sugar cane growing sticky and sweet from an impossible earth.
I am magic.
The lightening that animates the work.
The work that animates the soul.
The soul that animates the girl
The girl who animates the words
The words that make a world
Pulling panties from my palms
I know how to sit naked in a flower garden
Wrap my legs around an old oak tree.
Find the tectonic shutter of every leaf and limb.
Let them give me back the benefit of my name.
Can you see me?
I am learning how to bend easily in a breeze.
Lemongrass.
A lotus.
A pink bloom in pure water.
I am learning how to be a flower.
How to occupy this body with intention.
How to worship this skin.
How to praise the way it sighs and stretches over these long bones.
It is not a borrowed thing.
It is the most expensive things I own.
It…
…and my beating heart.
I am learning how to seek the sound of my flesh.
How to leap
and dance
and be still.
I am learning how to walk in my own purpose.
How to seek my own divine light.
What a celebrated journey.
What awesome soul stretching thing
What pretty stars in these eyes.
What bravery to love yourself widely enough to lean into your own magic.
To dance your blue-note melody all the days of your life.
I am learning how to BE a flower.
To smile into your wounds until they are petals in the wind for blowing.
To love the vast landscape of your heart.
To let it be a diamond mine in your chest.
A persistent gust of wind.
A meditation.
A love poem.
A Frohman album where you smile with all your teeth and every picture the way your name sounds as it moves through the lips of your beloved.
I am learning how to be a flower.
It is the best thing I have ever done.
In the morning I will walk into a river that greets me like a warm, wide mouth.
And I will remember to be grateful.
For you.
For me.
For the way the earth and all her audacity and wisdom keeps offering us
herself
over and again until we agree to be new.
To be made over.
To be rooted.
To bloom
and open to the sun.
Like a prayer
Or a kiss
Or the bamboo your spine can become
Or the flower gardens we are trying to plant in our chest
Yes.
Exactly like that.

RenéeLeave a comment

Super Orphan by Fatimah Asgh

Today, I donned my cape like a birth
certificate & jumped, arms wide into the sky.
–
I know—once there was a man.
Or maybe a woman.
Let’s try again: once, there was a family.
What came first?
–
What to do then, when the only history
you have is collage?
–
Woke up, parents still
dead. Outside, the leaves yawn,
re-christen themselves as spring.
–
Lets try again. Once there was a village
on a pale day, unaware of the greatness
at its gate.
–
Today, I woke:
Batman, a king over Gotham.
The city sinning at my feet
begging to be saved.
–
The same dream again:
police running after my faceless
family with guns
my uncle leaps into a tulip
filled field, arms turning to wings
as bullets greet him.
–
Today, I woke, slop-lipped
and drunk, cards in my hand,
Joker in my chest. Today I woke
angry at the world for its hurt
wanting to make more like me.
–
Are all refugees superheroes?
Do all survivors carry villain inside them?
–
Today, I donned my cape like a birth
certificate & jumped, arms wide into the sky.
–
How else to say I am here?

Sometimes by David Whyte

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Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

 

Start close in by David Whyte

RenéeLeave a comment

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.