Birch Island Books

Yule Darkening

Dark and beautiful, Holly watches, listens, loves.
We dance, spin, work, sweat, burn, make love, sing,
create, create, create,
spin, spin, out of control into joy,
weed, harvest, thresh, whether it be grain or skill or victory we strive for,
our humanity is in the striving.

And we are so, so human,
so very rarely wise.

Harvest, thresh, store, break our backs,
burn our hearts, think forward beyond today into the place of worry,
react to demand, demand,
spin, spin, out of control into panic,
anxious, bright, loud.

Dark and beautiful, Holly watches, listens, loves us in our folly,
gathers the frenetic world in his embrace,
Keeps us from falling off the edge,
So very, very softly begins to whisper “Hshh,
hshh,
hshh,”
So very, very gently tilts us away from the glare.

We do not notice yet.
We strive, weaken ourselves,
we push, drive ourselves, until the fuel is only will
and the will teeters on the edge of the world,
but we don’t fall off,
and we look up,
and how is it evening already?

Perhaps we can be done, just for tonight, just for a little while,
and somehow we remember, long ago, being rocked in strong arms,
and we wonder why we are reminded of that,
and why we want to eat fish and berries,
as the light draws away.

There is profound sleep nearby.
We do not all reach it,
but it is nearby.
Why is it that we hear a lullaby,
distant in some memory of some dream?

Yule Gathering

Dark and beautiful, Holly gathers us,
kith and kin, old and young, well and ill and teetering.

It’s time, he whispers, suggests, hums against our ears.
It’s time for wool and comfort and warm soup,
time to reach out across the leagues and pull our dear ones closer.

Time, little ones,
I will slow time down for you.

I will make the woods a quilt of many colors for you
to burrow beneath
and then let the colors fade to bronze and holly.
And dark.

Time to make the food your grandparents made.
Time to tell the tales your great-grandparents told.
Time to sing the songs older than memory.
Time to light the fire older than song.

I will make the woods a quilt of white for you
to burrow beneath.
white and bronze and holly.
And dark

Come into my arms,
light your way by candlelight in children’s eyes
and by the weathered face of your true love.

Come into my arms,
let your love be manifest in gift, in touch, in trust.
Walk in candlelight and song from neighbor to neighbor,
in sacred touch of care.

I will carry you as you carry me.
Carry holly, ivy, spruce, pine, hemlock, mistletoe, cyprus, juniper, cedar,
beautiful cedar whose flower has become so precious,
carry these,
carry me,
and I will carry you.

We gather in and suddenly recognize one and another and another and draw close
and the glare is gone,
and the din,
and we have stars in our hair, in our branches, in our dreams,
rocking, rocking, rocking,

To sleep.

Yule Healing

I am not certain, but I do not need to be.
I dreamed that I slept,
cozy in a cave with all my cubs and kin and the fires were banked and dim and somehow there were stars above us.

I dreamed that Holly, dark and beautiful, rough and gentle and crownèd evergreen, moved among us all where we slept off the pain.
He stopped and bent and pulled a blanket up closer.
With a word he calmed those who cried out in dreams.
With a touch he cooled the fevers.
With his hand on my heart he eased the clenching loneliness and then moved on.

The small ones he fed and washed and returned to parents’ arms.
The four-foots he stroked and told how well they had done.

He simply sat with the ones who cannot sleep,
sat and listened,
listened to the stories
then listened to the silence,
then listened to the tears,
and did not judge.
The ones who cannot sleep are particularly dear to him.

He moved to every one of us,
or so I dreamed,
and came finally to his brother:
exhausted,
mad,
spent,
broken,
leaves of oak still tangled in his hair.

Holly came finally to his brother
and lifted him up in his arms
and carried him to the banked fire and tended his wounds and broken head and bursting heart.
I dreamed that Holly cradled his brother up like a puppy
and rocked him and hushed him and healed him for as long as it took.

and saw the reflection of a woman strong like a birch tree —
Tall,
graceful,
gracious,
aging absolutely fabulously —

and who bends in the various storms.

Where are you?

Where are you?

The emptiness echoes my own small voice and I am thinning, thinning, and I know you are missing and I don’t remember who you are.

A few dry, yellow leaves on the ground.
The grass is growing more slowly.

Oh, don’t go.
I’m afraid that the memories will fade.

I haven’t written much new poetry since Sgiobalta…
you know.
Since my sweetest, softest, bestest girl ever…

I still can’t say it.

My friend needed to heal her brain after injury,
and I’m so very grateful for the miracles of modern medicine —
and by miracles, I mean people who studied and researched and put in massive hours, who imagined and hypothesized and collaborated —
which allowed her to use bio-feedback for this task.

She worked hard. Training parts of the body not under conscious control is very hard work. She pushed and tried and made incremental progress to get back to who she knew she had been: a mom, wife, activist, daughter, artist, wonderful multi-dimensional mind.

Her technician brought her tea.

She dropped the focus on the task and reached out to this tech, her heart and mind completely full of gratitude for this kindness and connection.

Her biofeedback boards lit up.

Elegance of feather-light forms in swirling fluid
cowlicks of wind do-si-do
and the magic falls so thickly that the world beyond the meadow is only ghosts of trees that I cannot hear.

Hush, hush, hush.
Drift away from the world of worries.

Be here and now
in the dance.

Where did the notion come from that there’s a correct way to sleep?
“Awake in the middle and then second sleep”
Has been true since the savannah, since the trees.

I am awake in the middle.
But, consarn it, we’ve stopped saving daylight
Which makes this too early to be too late to go back to bed,
but Second Sleep does not call me. Yet.

scattered on the forest floor,
hooting from deep within the canopy,
encoded in the jumble of color on my daughter’s bed.

Poetry in the scent of my wife and the taste of mangoes in my granola and the dance of eager paws.

Within and without,
created and found,

Sights and words and heartbeats.

by months of Other Things
and summer days and long twilights
and deep sleep and deep loves and complex stories.

All wonderful, chosen things,
but they were not stars and I had lost the thread of the story above me.

I looked up just now, just this morning,
an autumn morning when the Night lingers and the dawnlight keeps its own counsel yet.
I looked up.

There he is.