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Love is a Hungry Fox
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
Last night, a dove cried on my window.
She wept for her lover in the fox’s belly,
her mourning woke me to moonless night.
“Little one,” I whispered across the sill,
“Come in and rest your tears somewhere safe.”
But she would not come near.
“You’re the wife of the fox who ate my man,
and your love is hot in him. If you feel sorrow,
then so will he, the one who ate your heart.”
Then I wept for her and for myself.
I shook with tears for all the loves
stolen and maimed in the world.
My Todd came home at first light,
his eyes a trickster laugh.
I wore my anger like a coat,
my hair a flaming red.
But he laughed at me and kissed my hands.
“Don’t be angry with me who holds your heart,”
he said with a toothy smile.
“I exist to make the little birds faster and the
sleek hares nimbler,
without me
they’d grow lazy and die, and where would be
the food in that?”
“I exist to make you, you, and
without me, you’d never learn
to be more than who you are now.
I am your longing and I will devour
until there is nothing left but an empty cup
filling up with the tears of the world.”
read comments (0)Kitsune Todd
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
He was going about fox business
when I met him again.
The trees were thick and he wore that
hunter’s grin on long black lips.
And when I asked him of the day,
he said
“Kiss me quick.”
My heart ached like fangs sunk deep–
stealing the wind, a desert in drought.
I placed my lips to his cold wet nose
as he breathed in my vital breath.
No sound but the fire burning within,
now igniting in me as we breathed as one.
Heart sat stuck, stuck in my throat,
choking on care, desire, and whim.
He ate my heart with that fatal kiss,
devoured it bloodied red and raw.
My heart burned up in the belly of a fox,
I did not know love could empty the self.
The universe seeps in this hole for a heart,
pulse-pulse-pulsing with the beat of stars.
*”kitsune” is the Japanese word for a fox, but in Eastern culture, the fox is so much more than “just” a fox. They are shapeshifters who, like many other cultures’ Otherworld inhabitants, fall in love with humans, mete out justice, trick the greedy and foolish, etc. The fox who has kept appearing to me in my border dreams is very much a kind of Otherworld fox … and his name “Todd” is linked to my animus. This poem comes from an actual dream-body experience.
Todd
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
It’s enough,
his laughing eyes to melt with mine
as he walks past me uninhibited.
“See me,” his sleek perfection demands.
It’s enough,
to be a woman alone with him,
in a wild, long-forgotten place
of all things, to find him waiting.
It’s enough,
his face a full moon of recognition
and my mind unsettled by his desire.
“You’re mine,” his smiling fangs declare.
More than enough,
his bold attempts at wooing, enough
to make me fall in love forever,
my soul caught naked by a fox.
Red Birds Laughing
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
Something drew me out
from a long unsensing sleep
into the woods behind my house.
Maybe it was the snow melting into sunshine
or the blue morning deepening into noon.
Maybe it was the red birds laughing outside my window
or perhaps it was the silence
between their songs giving way
to another world awakening from seed.
Another Faith
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
Speak into the darkness
like a child praying.
Age does not lessen
your need for faith.
I don’t mean
blindly binding soul to dogma
or sacrificing intuition at devotion’s hands.
There is another faith
that lives beyond these,
waiting for you–
not on the mountain top of wonder
but beyond, in valleys
deep with yew, oak and hazel,
moss, cress, mushroom and stone,
fine leg, hoof, snout, fin and tail,
hiding behind the mask of many.
It is the faithfulness of love
that dares to look straight into the
Heart of God
and melt into that fierce sun, again and again.
To feast at the table of faith is
to open your mind
to the vulnerabilities of being
human,
to admit without shame
that you can never live up
to your own expectations.
Instead, faith is bringing home
the subtle fear
that makes you believe
every other story but your own.
When you tread with faith
up the spiral milky Way,
you are a star in the night
a naked light without agenda
or any other power but to
shine.
Only when the inner heat of longing
burns up the clothes
of what you thought you knew
and all other loves you claimed for yourself,
Only when there is nothing left
between you and the darkness
can you make love,
skin to skin and breath to breath,
with the Heart in all hearts.
Only then does faith become
another word for “know”.
Sliabh na mBan*
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
“Climb with me to the top”,
picking berries in autumnal sun,
warm and sticky, hot breathed wind
carries her promise of love.
We wend our way in curves,
dizzy with lust, that untamed bird,
leading us up the hill of pleasure,
shy but laughing, intending more.
I chase you, feet wild in pursuit,
rampant in my longing like
Grainne demanding of Diarmuid
unbreakable vows … or else.
Tumbling, you fall, into the bosom
of the earth, a heather bed made
ready for two eager-mouthed youths,
our legs already a lover’s knot.
Not even the gods of this place,
could come between our bond,
as I share with you my fruit,
a marriage feast for two hearts.
Juice explodes in our mouths,
sweet hunger for more and more,
dripping with red-lipped desire
and stained by a heavy harvest.
We are two wild things, two
blackbirds starved to madness,
two waves rolling into the other,
as we heave our delight to heaven.
“Climb with me to the top”,
to the height of heady dreams,
where even Sliabh na mBan
becomes inflamed with our love.
*Sliabh na mBan is a place in Co. Tipperary, Ireland, where Grainne (one of the most beautiful women in Irish myth) fell in love with Diarmuid instead of her older and rather elderly betrothed Fionn (a bit like Trystan and Isyllt). It was traditional in both Ireland and Wales for young couples to go ‘berry picking’ in late summer, early autumn on the hillsides, but of course, it was also a euphemism for so much more! Both in Irish and in Welsh, there is a close tie between the words for ’sex’ and for ‘hill’ (they are almost identical) showing how ancient the practice of lovemaking on hillsides was. And they still do it, haha.
Amidst the Damson Trees
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
Out here,
amidst the damson trees,
there is another time beyond time.
I gather fruit,
one basket, then another,
but feel the closing in of otherness.
tree roots descend down,
down into the hidden layers of life.
Like a mist
Out here,
amidst the damson trees,
memories speak and secrets flow.
Berry Mother, Fruit Mother
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
Berry mother
Fruit mother
arms laden with generosity,
your blackthorn eyes of damson purple,
blinking brightly, jewel of the harvest,
a hundred good things gathered together,
made sweet by the fullness of sun and time.
Berry mother
Fruit mother
arms outreached in hospitality,
your rowan red lips and rosehip cheeks,
laughing merrily, kiss of delight,
a hundred happy times kept in store,
ready for winter’s darker disarray.
Berry mother
Fruit mother
Giver of jams and jellies, marmalades, pies and tarts, syrups, wines, cordials, spirits, sauces, toppings and dips
Like a child,
each autumn,
I run to you
and greet the bounties of life.
Practice
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
Sat in the dark,
cross legged with my pain,
this is the place of practice.
I don’t expect it to make me feel better,
or release me from the anguish inside.
I just want to sit,
for a moment, to
be
even in the intensity of mind
rising up from
the solitude of a broken heart,
forgetting what I know and don’t know,
what I thought happened, what did and didn’t
just
breathing
just
feeling
just …. living.
Crazy Cailleach
Posted by Jenn in Living Poetry
No bus in sight or house around,
just a weary place with cloud coming down,
a gown of white and hail-stone tears,
dropping hard like forgotten years.
And at the corner of a hawthorn’s back
stood an old woman with a smoker’s hack,
hack hack hacking at the cold night air
and in her eyes a menacing glare.
Chain smoking on cheap cigars
with clothing from eccentric bazaars,
her eyes all green and eerie slats,
outlined bold like a luckless cat.
Her hands are hennaed in blue and brown,
gypsy scarves wrapping themselves around,
tentacles of some entrancing witch,
or the unleashed mane of a she-wolf bitch.
She shakes a fist at the ice-bitten sky
and curses God in a soughing sigh,
all the wind wailing within her words
and the prophetic cawing of forlorn birds.
I shiver and quake and turn away
from the strange old woman with the deathly stare.
I would rather walk home in the stormy fray
than face the Cailleach who’s forsaken care.