Category Archives: poetry

Tuesday Poetry Blogging


Barbara Starrett said:

I am a secret agent
Of the moon

Ex-centric
Extra-ordinary
Extra-sensory
Extra-terrestrial

Celestial subversive
Con-spiratorial
Spirita Sancta

Holy
Holy
Holy

And then some.

And I have friends.

May you, too, have such friends.

Picture found here

Tuesday Poetry Blogging


Last Spring
BY GOTTFRIED BENN
TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HOFMANN

Fill yourself up with the forsythias
and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too
with your blood and happiness and wretchedness,
the dark ground that seems to come with you.

Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome.
And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows,
then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you
into June, when the roses blow.
Source: Poetry (March 2011).

PIcture found here.

V Early Morning Saturday Poetry Blogging

Poem
BY MURIEL RUKEYSER
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Friday Night Poetry Blogging


FULL MOON ON K STREET

The moon has your face tonight,
hiding behind black-violet veils
of clouds, coy, intimating nothing.

Like an orange outside the grasp
of a starving child, you stab my heart.
All longing is the same.

No natural light penetrates
this street; the lampposts rule.
The high-rises have mothered

them from their concrete wombs,
bidding us rejoice in coldness,
disdaining the celestial tease.

The moon has phases. Though I pray
not, you might be one. The clouds
pull tight, tight around your mouth.
~ Miles David Moore

Picture (from a different part of DC) found here.

Tuesday Poetry Blogging


To a Skylark
~Wm. Wordsworth

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye
Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

Tuesday Poetry Blogging


Since There Is No Escape
~Sara Teasdale

Since there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
And hours alone too still and sure for prayer—
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
In pride, and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead
If there is any way to baffle death.

Picture found here.

Monday Poetry Blogging


What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison

~CAMILLE T. DUNGY

I.
Only now, in spring, can the place be named:
tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple,
dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow
on my knowing. All winter I was lost.
Fall, I found myself here, with no texture
my fingers know. Then, worse, the white longing
that downed us deep three months. No flower heat.
That was winter. But now, in spring, the buds
flock our trees. Ten million exquisite buds,
tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings,
bellowing from ashen branches vibrant
keys, the chords of spring’s triumph: fisted heart,
dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.
The song is drink, is color. Come. Now. Taste.

II.
The song is drink, is color. Come now, taste
what the world has to offer. When you eat
you will know that music comes in guises—
bold of crepe myrtle, sweet of daffodil—
beyond sound, guises they never told you
could be true. And they aren’t. Except they are
so real now, this spring, you know them, taste them.
Green as kale, the songs of spring, bright as wine,
the music. Faces of this season grin
with clobbering wantonness—see the smiles
open on each branch?—until you, too, smile.
Wide carnival of color, carnival
of scent. We’re all lurching down streets, drunk now
from the poplar’s grail. Wine spray: crab apple.

III.
From the poplar’s grail, wine spray. Crab apple
brightens jealously to compete. But by
the crab apple’s deep stain, the tulip tree
learns modesty. Only blush, poplar learns,
lightly. Never burn such a dark-hued fire
to the core. Tulip poplar wants herself
light under leaf, never, like crab apple,
heavy under tart fruit. Never laden.
So the poplar pours just a hint of wine
in her cup, while the crab apple, wild one,
acts as if her body were a fountain.
She would pour wine onto you, just let her.
Shameless, she plants herself, and delivers,
down anyone’s street, bright invitations.

IV.
Down anyone’s street-bright invitations.
Suck ‘em. Swallow ‘em. Eat them whole. That’s right,
be greedy about it. The brightness calls
and you follow because you want to taste,
because you want to be welcomed inside
the code of that color: red for thirst; green
for hunger; pink, a kiss; and white, stain me
now. Soil me with touching. Is that right?
No? That’s not, you say, what you meant. Not what
you meant at all? Pardon. Excuse me, please.
Your hand was reaching, tugging at this shirt
of flowers and I thought, I guess I thought
you were hungry for something beautiful.
Come now. The brightness here might fill you up.

V.
Come. Now the brightness here might fill you up,
but tomorrow? Who can know what the next
day will bring. It is like that, here, in spring.
Four days ago, the dogwood was a fist
in protest. Now look. Even she unfurls
to the pleasure of the season. Don’t be
ashamed of yourself. Don’t be. This happens
to us all. We have thrown back the blanket.
We’re naked and we’ve grown to love ourselves.
I tell you, do not be ashamed. Who is
more wanton than the dancing crepe myrtle?
Is she ashamed? Why, even the dogwood,
that righteous tree of God’s, is full of lust
exploding into brightness every spring.

VI.
Exploding into brightness every spring,
I draw you close. I wonder, do you know
how long I’ve wanted to be here? Each year
you grasp me, lift me, carry me inside.
Glee is the body of the daffodil
reaching tubed fingers through the day, feeling
her own trumpeted passion choiring air
with hot, colored song. This is a texture
I love. This is life. And, too, you love me,
inhale my whole being every spring. Gone
winter, heavy clod whose icy body
fell into my bed. I must leave you, but
I’ll wait through heat, fall, freeze to hear you cry:
Daffodils are up. My God, what beauty!

VII.
Daffodils are up, my God! What beauty
concerted down on us last night. And if
I sleep again, I’ll wake to a louder
blossoming, the symphony smashing down
hothouse walls, and into the world: music.
Something like the birds’ return, each morning’s
crescendo rising toward its brightest pitch,
colors unfurling, petals alluring.
The song, the color, the rising ecstasy
of spring. My God. This beauty. This, this
is what I’ve hoped for. All my life is here
in the unnamed core—dogwood, daffodil,
tulip poplar, crab apple, crepe myrtle—
only now, in spring, can the place be named.

Picture found here.

A Poem for Ostara


The Enkindled Spring
~D.H. Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up, and the flickering, watery rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, these sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

Picture found here.

Monday Poetry Blogging


I am continuing to sit at my altar for Japan.

A Song on the End of the World

~ Czeslaw Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Warsaw, 1944

Picture found here.

Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare


Euclid by Thomas Lynch

What sort of morning was Euclid having
when he first considered parallel lines?
Or that business about how things equal
to the same thing are equal to each other?
Who’s to know what the day has in it?
This morning Burt took it into his mind
to make a long bow out of Osage orange
and went on eBay to find the cow horns
from which to fashion the tips of the thing.
You better have something to pass the time,
he says, stirring his coffee, smiling.
And Murray is carving a model truck
from a block of walnut he found downstairs.
Whittling away he thinks of the years
he drove between Detroit and Buffalo
delivering parts for General Motors.
Might he have nursed theorems on lines and dots
or the properties of triangles or
the congruence of adjacent angles?
Or clearing customs at Niagara Falls,
arrived at some insight on wholes and parts
or an axiom involving radii
and the making of circles, how distance
from a center point can be both increased
endlessly and endlessly split—a mystery
whereby the local and the global share
the same vexations and geometry?
Possibly this is where God comes into it,
who breathed the common notion of coincidence
into the brain of that Alexandrian
over breakfast twenty-three centuries back,
who glimpsed for a moment that morning the sense
it all made: life, killing time, the elements,
the dots and lines and angles of connection—
an egg’s shell opened with a spoon, the sun’s
connivance with the moon’s decline, Sophia
the maidservant pouring juice; everything,
everything coincides, the arc of memory,
her fine parabolas, the bend of a bow,
the curve of the earth, the turn in the road.

Picture found here.

The Glory of the Garden


The Glory of the Garden
by Rudyard Kipling


Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You will find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all;
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks:
The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:--"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.

There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick.
But it can find some needful job that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!

Picture found here.

Back from a day with my family and inundated with seeds, especially stinging nettles, which I'm trying for the first time this year. What are you potting up?

Friday Poetry Blogging


The Witch

I HAVE walked a great while over the snow,
And I am not tall nor strong.
My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set,
And the way was hard and long.
I have wandered over the fruitful earth,
But I never came here before.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

The cutting wind is a cruel foe.
I dare not stand in the blast.
My hands are stone, and my voice a groan,
And the worst of death is past.
I am but a little maiden still,
My little white feet are sore.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

Her voice was the voice that women have,
Who plead for their heart's desire.
She came--she came--and the quivering flame
Sunk and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor,
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Picture found here.

Printing Prayers on Water


In Becoming Animal, An Earthly Cosmology, David Abram writes:
[At a gompa, the resident lama] took my hand and led me down a long trail to the river, so I could watch his two students as they worked with temple woodblocks artfully carved with Tibetan ritual verses. Normally these precious woodblocks were used to print out liturgical books. But now -- amazingly! -- the students were stamping the wood-blocks over and over into the flowing surface of the river, so that the water would carry those printed prayers to the many lands through which it traveled on its long way to the Indian Ocean.

Here, remarkably, was a culture wherein written letters were not used merely as a record of words once spoken, or as a score for oral speech, but as efficacious forces in their own right. The letters were not just passive signs, but energetic agents actively affecting the space around them. Whether written on the page of a book or carved into woodblocks, whether etched into standing stones or printed on flags, the Tibetan letters held a power that could be activated not only by human beings but by insects crawling through their cracks, and by water flowing along their shapes, and even by the breeze gusting across them. Human intentions, carried in dreams and prayers, mingled here with the intentions of stones, trees, and rivers. Clearly, "mind" in this mountain region was not a human possession; it was a power proper to every part of the elemental field.

It's common at some point in the training of almost every Witch or magic worker to hear that "words have power." We say it and then we move on. IMHO, it's one of those "basic teachings that are too basic for beginners"; one needs to keep coming back to this precept over and over, spiraling back and learning it more dimensionally each time.

It's part of the reason that I love poetry and promote it regularly to my (mostly) Pagan readers and it's part of the reason that boring, repetitive, bland calling of the Elements drives my priestess soul insane. It's why I'll go to the wall over the need for magical workings to have clearly stated intentions. (If you can't state it clearly, there's a pretty good chance that you've not thought it out, clearly, either. The one tends to foster the other. And I'm too respectful of magic to go releasing energy at some vague, misunderstood target.) And it's the reason why I go on and on about the importance of how we frame issues. When we mingle our intentions with those of stones, trees, and rivers, we owe it to those other entities to use one of our tools -- language -- as respectfully and as skillfully as possible.

What power do you find in words?

Picture found here.

You Dropped a Piece of Sod on It


I completely lifted this from Margaret Roach's A Way to Garden. I've done all of these and more. You?
Why Did My Plant Die?

You walked too close. You trod on it.
You dropped a piece of sod on it.
You hoed it down. You weeded it.
You planted it the wrong way up.
You grew it in a yogurt cup
But you forgot to make a hole;
The soggy compost took its toll.
September storm. November drought.
It heaved in March, the roots popped out.
You watered it with herbicide.
You scattered bonemeal far and wide.
Attracting local omnivores,
Who ate your plant and stayed for more.
You left it baking in the sun
While you departed at a run
To find a spade, perhaps a trowel,
Meanwhile the plant threw in the towel.
You planted it with crown too high;
The soil washed off, that explains why.
Too high pH. It hated lime.
Alas it needs a gentler clime.
You left the root ball wrapped in plastic.
You broke the roots. They’re not elastic.
You walked too close. You trod on it.
You dropped a piece of sod on it.
You splashed the plant with mower oil.
You should do something to your soil.
Too rich. Too poor. Such wretched tilth.
Your soil is clay. Your soil is filth.
Your plant was eaten by a slug.
The growing point contained a bug.
These aphids are controlled by ants,
Who milk the juice, it kills the plants.
In early spring your garden’s mud.
You walked around! That’s not much good.
With heat and light you hurried it.
You worried it. You buried it.
The poor plant missed the mountain air:
No heat, no summer muggs up there.
You overfed it 10-10-10.
Forgot to water it again.
You hit it sharply with the hose.
You used a can without a rose.
Perhaps you sprinkled from above.
You should have talked to it with love.
The nursery mailed it without roots.
You killed it with those gardening boots.
You walked too close. You trod on it.
You dropped a piece of sod on it.

“Why Did My Plant Die?” is just one piece of the wisdom in Geoffrey Charlesworth’s book “The Opinionated Gardener: Random Offshoots From an Alpine Garden,” a collectible must for every gardener’s bookshelf.

I had dinner tonight w/ Son, DiL, and G/Son, and G/Son and I were planning our weekend. He asked if we could plant some vegetable seeds and I said, "Sure, I have some squash, tomato, and cucumber seeds," and G/Son said, "Carrots!" (His mom makes the most amazing dilled carrots and they're his favorite vegetable.) I promised to pick up some carrot seeds.

I think when we're planting them, I'll tell him Michael Pollan's story about learning to think like a plant. Pollan's carrots were short, stunted, and knobby (one is tempted to say: mean, brutish, and short, and indeed, I have known carrots that were, indeed) and he couldn't figure out why, until he challenged himself to think like a carrot. Imagining that his finger was a carrot, he stuck it into his garden soil to see if he could figure out why a carrot wouldn't be happy there. And, he found that his soil was -- wait for it -- hard. His finger could only go in a few inches before it stopped and more pressure wasn't able to move it any farther down. That's when Pollan learned not only to till his carrot garden soil so that it was nice and loose, even very deep down, filled with soft, loamy, composty soil, but also how to think like a plant.

Last night I was reading David Abram's chapter about how thoughts come and go (and talk of Michalengelo -- no Hecate! not everything is a reason to segue into poetry! control!) depending upon our physical surroundings and how:
What if there is, yes, a quality of inwardness to the mind, not because the mind is located inside us (inside our body or brain), but because we are situated, bodily, inside it -- because our lives and our thoughts unfold in the depths of a mind that is not really ours, but is rather the Earth's? What if like the hunkered owl, and the spruce bending above it, and the beetle staggering from needle to needle to needle on that branch, we all partake of the wide intelligence (be still de Chardin! Abrams is talking about something that undergirds and will, perhaps, outlast, the noosphere) of this world -- because we're materially participant, with our actions and our passions, in the broad psyche of this sphere?

And I think that the thoughts of the carrots and the thoughts of the gardener make, when gardening is done right, one thought. And yet, we gardeners, (We few, we happy few, we band of -- stop! It's carrot seeds, not Agincourt!), we do still keep killing plants, often with the best of (watery) intentions. Indeed, someone once said that, if you are not killing plants, you are gardening below your abilities. I, myself, am guilty of many, many, many (mea culpa, mea . . . stop! you're not catholic anymore) things, but gardening below my abilities is, Flora knows, not one of them.

So, G/Son and I have a lot of plans for this weekend. Something outside if the weather is at all fine. A trip to the toy store. A game of "Calvin Ball Chase," which for reasons both obscure and occult, G/Son and I call "The Power of Salt," (where G/Son gets to change the rules at will) in the basement. An experiment to see which fruits taste best dipped in chocolate. (G/Son is holding out for watermelon and croissants (not exactly, scientifically a fruit, but, well we are mad scientists) and I am voting for oranges, but DiL thinks maybe bananas will be best. We are going to take pictures, put them in a document, write something about each one under the picture, and let G/Son take it to school on Tuesday.) Nonna got a book about Dr. King that she wants to read before we go to bed. And we will probably watch some Scooby Doo and snack on some spiced nuts because, well, because that is how we roll.

And, we are going to plant carrot seeds and think like carrots. We are going to be, in Abrams' words, materially participant, with our actions and our passions, in the broad psyche of this sphere. No, seriously, that's what I think is happening when an old woman and her G/Son plant some carrot seeds. I do.

You come, too.

Picture found here.

What Sadness Sounds Like


I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee

BY HOWARD NEMEROV

I tell you that I see her still
At the dark entrance of the hall.
One gas lamp burning near her shoulder
Shone also from her other side
Where hung the long inaccurate glass
Whose pictures were as troubled water.
An immense shadow had its hand
Between us on the floor, and seemed
To hump the knuckles nervously,
A giant crab readying to walk,
Or a blanket moving in its sleep.

You will remember, with a smile
Instructed by movies to reminisce,
How strict her corsets must have been,
How the huge arrangements of her hair
Would certainly betray the least
Impassionate displacement there.
It was no rig for dallying,
And maybe only marriage could
Derange that queenly scaffolding—
As when a great ship, coming home,
Coasts in the harbor, dropping sail
And loosing all the tackle that had laced
Her in the long lanes ....
I know
We need not draw this figure out.
But all that whalebone came from whales.
And all the whales lived in the sea,
In calm beneath the troubled glass,
Until the needle drew their blood.

I see her standing in the hall,
Where the mirror’s lashed to blood and foam,
And the black flukes of agony
Beat at the air till the light blows out.

Picture found here.

Sixth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival


There are the poems that you love, and then there are the poems that you write into your will. Here's one that I made the nice young lawyer from the white-shoe law firm write into mine:

When Death Comes

~Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.


Picture found here.

Poetry for Imbolc


Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
-- Sheenagh Pugh

On this Imbolc, may it be so for you.

Photo by the author; if you copy, please link back.

Sixth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival


Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

-- David Whyte
from Everything is Waiting for You
©2003 Many Rivers Press

Reading Becoming Animal by David Abram has been reminding me of this great poem by David Whyte. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at a meeting between the two of them.

May your Imbolc be inspiring and bright.

Picture found here.

Get Going!


There are several cool things coming up; a few local and one global.

First, if you live in, or near, DC, or if you can get here, mark your calendar now so you'll remember to attend the Red Dragon Feast on February 12th. The Feast is scheduled from 2:00 to 5:00 in the Renaissance Hall of Westminster Presbyterian Church, 400 I St., S.W., Washington, D.C. The donation is $13.00.
The Red Dragon Feast is an annual magical feast and fundraiser for healing blood-borne disease. Donations benefit community building and a local charity committed to healing blood borne disease.

The event takes place in three phases:
1. drumming, dancing and ritual
2. toasting and feasting
3. a silent and live auction

We focus our intent by
- wearing red clothes
- eating red food
- toasting with red drink

~~~~~~~~~

We honor the survivors of these diseases, the health care professionals and researchers who are fighting to help them, and the memory of those who have died from blood-borne diseases. This three hour ceremony is a festive, collective prayer for cures ... an event that is serious fun!

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All Hail the Red Dragon!
All Hail the Life Giving Blood!

All content is public.

The event is sponsored and organized by the DC Radical Faeries.
The Radical Faeries is a community-based group, mostly of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people, devoted to the panspiritual exploration of Queer spirituality. The DC Radical Faeries affirms the sacredness of Queer lives and promotes interfaith collaboration.

For over a decade, the DC Radical Faeries have hosted weekly potlucks, celebrated solar and lunar holidays, and coordinated events in the metropolitan area.

Second, if your practice involves gardening, you have two chances to participate in local seed exchanges, including one at which the DC Guerilla Gardeners will be present:

> Saturday, January 29, 2011 (Brookside Gardens, Wheaton, MD)
> Saturday, February 5, 2011 (Green Spring Gardens, Alexandria, VA)

[DC Guerilla Gardeners will] be at the February 5th event, swappin' seeds and telling everyone who will listen about the D.C. Guerilla Gardeners and our fabulousness!

Or, from anywhere, participate in this effort to study heirloom seeds.

Third, anyone with access to the web can participate in the Sixth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival.
It is that time of year again, when bloggers around the world post a favorite poem in honor of Brigid, the Irish goddess and patron saint of smithcraft, poetry, and healing. Brigid’s feast day is February 1st, so between now and then is the perfect time to publish a poem to celebrate.

Picture found here.

Exchanging Seeds



I can almost feel Imbolc stirring itself from deep inside my Mother and beginning to rise through the root-chilling red clay and rock-hard frozen surface of my tiny bit of Earth. I am longing like a thirsty woman for a taste of that icy water of inspiration, for all that I know that Imbolc is often considered a fire festival. Imbolc is a time to honor inspiration and the plain old hard work of forging new tools, as well as a time to commit to a warming that we can, often, only believe, rather than sense. I am willing, even if it makes me a foolish old woman, to commit to the warming. (My broken ankle, which simply FEELS itself more this time of year, and my too-cold-even-in-socks-toes, and my full-of-pain-even-in-gloves-fingertips are all ready to commit, as well.)

I am sifting, and hunting, and dreaming about which poems I will contribute to the Sixth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival. So many poems; so little time.

By Imbolc, I will have made my selections -- limited this year, as I'm really serious about upping my already-quite-healthy level of savings -- from the many issues of garden porn seed catalogues that arrive this time of year, and will start some seedlings -- always one of my favorite acts as a priestess. (My nomination for the best seed catalogue cover in years: this year's Seed Savers cover. Who knew that deep purple, deep red, and bright yellow were so gorgeous together?) Also, can I just say that the picture in this year's catalogue of their seed-drying barn, (go here and click through 24 times) is number two on my list of places in which I'd almost kill to, but likely never will, do ritual? (Number 1 is (after dark on the night of a full Moon, when the park is closed) the old Capitol pillars at the National Arboretum.) I want to dance through that barnfull of heirloom DNA in the worst kind of way; I've been there in my dreams almost every night since I've seen it. Seed Savers, I don't suppose you'd like some Witches to come bless your crops?

A few days after Imbolc, I'm going to an v exciting seed swap. I have woad, and pineapple sage, and sunflower seeds to bring. I'd love to find someone with Pam's Choice foxglove or Hollyhock Nigra to give away. I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at coconut echinacea or Bowles Black viola.

What can you bring to life's seed exchange? What would you like to get?

Photo by the author; if you copy, please link back.

A Sleep of Prisoners


Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity's sake!

~Christopher Fry

Picture of The Awakening found here.

January



O winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire,
What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn
Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn
Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire
The streams than under ice. June could not hire
Her roses to forego the strength they learn
In sleeping on thy breast. No fires can burn
The bridges thou dost lay where men desire
In vain to build.

O Heart, when Love's sun goes
To northward, and the sounds of singing cease,
Keep warm by inner fires, and rest in peace.
Sleep on content, as sleeps the patient rose.
Walk boldly on the white untrodden snows,
The winter is the winter's own release.

~Helen Hunt Jackson

Picture found here.

Friday Poetry Blogging


Dancing with Green Bees

Find your way to the third hearth
to become a woman of clay -- again.

Just when you believe you are
the definition of thirst,
have endured too many erasures
sealed inside a sere landscape,
you will whirl into the dance
of dragonflies.

Or the dance of the green bees
-- starting in the yellow sheen of morning,
of cactus bloom, of meadowlark, of the shining --
will fling you maiden-like beneath birdshadow.

The path to the third hearth
is strewn with surprises of sparkling quartzite.
You are amidst a fortress of rock, a cathedral of stone,
and the elemental particulate that has undergone
its many metamorphoses as have you.
Landscape bids you to absorb time,
breathe earth dust, the primordial.

There at the third hearth
the women of clay await you.
By their painted faces will you know them.

~Karla Linn Merrifield, printed in Crone, Issue No. 3.

Picture found here.