Welcome to Poetry Party Number 35!
I select an image and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your poems or other reflections. If you have your own blog, please use the Mister Linky widget below to add a link back to your website. If you don’t have your own blog (not required to participate) or if you just want to post your poem here, please skip Mister Linky and go straight to the comments section to add your poem. Make sure to check the comments for new poems added and I encourage you to leave encouraging comments for each other either here or at the poet’s own blog.
Feel free to take your poem in any direction and then post the image and invitation on your blog if you have one and encourage others to come join the party! (permission is granted to reprint the image if a link is provided back to this post)
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The Poetry Party Theme:
Lately I have been contemplating the sacred feminine and sacred masculine as integral elements of my spiritual path and practice. One dimension of these is what Richard Rohr calls the “Sacred Yes” and the “Sacred No”. The feminine with its archetype of welcoming, nurturing, enfolding energy is the Sacred Yes of our lives — all those things, people, and opportunities we embrace. The masculine with its archetype of boundary setting and protection (think warrior) is the Sacred No of our lives — the healthy setting of limits and protectors of our gifts and energies so we don’t over-extend ourselves.
I have been very much in a season of yes lately, welcoming and embracing many amazing opportunities that have come my way. Just in the last couple of weeks I am feeling more of a draw again to contemplate the places of no in my life. The opportunities to which I am not being called right now or which take energy away from the yeses to which I have committed myself fully. Accompanying my meditation on the Sacred No has been the image of the Guardian of the Threshold. These allies and companions are much like the gargoyles and statuary placed at the entrances to European buildings to ward off evil spirits. Our own internal guardians are those fierce aspects of ourselves that help us to clarify what is life-draining and what we need to release to live fully and help to maintain those boundaries. The photo was taken in Riga, Latvia last summer on our ancestral pilgrimage.
What does your own Guardian of the Threshold look like? What is he or she helping you to say no to? What is the yes that needs protecting these days?
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Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts
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43 Responses
The guardian stands
Protecting
Preserving
Promising
Sanity and solitude
Safety and sanctuary
In the midst of a severe storm
It cues me to cross the threshold from chaos
Into a labrynth of peace
Where I can walk and breathe and just be
This sentinel is an image of strength
To hang on
To be resourceful
To not go it alone
As this guard sits alongside our rocky path
I will stand
My family will stand
Prepared to find patience
And to protect peace.
–Karla 5/12/09
What an amazing gathering here already and it is only Tuesday morning! Thank you for all of your poetic beauty and brilliance.
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kigen, I love those two trinities you begin with and the prayer of the heart you offer here.
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Carolyn, this is such a treasure from Mary Oliver, I have always loved the image of the “new voice / which you slowly / recognized as your own.”
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Paul Tomlinson, thank you for this beautiful window into the your guardian. I love how she embraces both energies helping you to listen deeply.
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Richard, I love your poem and left a longer comment at your blog.
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Barbara, what a delightful guardian you have with the roar of a lion to defend against those fears and a body of a sweet love welcoming in that trust. You are most welcome! I adore the Poetry Parties, loads of fun.
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Tom Delmore, your crow is a potent talisman, holding the wound and the rising together in its feathered extension.
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Dez, your words are very powerful, potent even. I experience both the stone-hard resistance and the tender surrender to a whole new way of being.
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Grady, your opening comment made me smile. I am one-quarter Latvian (father’s father) and it is where my father was born. I love your use of poetic form and rhyme to create a sense of structure within your poem itself to support the words you reflect on. Beautiful.
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Terri, this is such a wonderful sequence of images, like a series of jewels along a set of prayer beads.
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Shelley, your poem made me smile so much, especially this line “I think I could get used to this” — indeed sister, let’s all try to get used to that inner dragon lady ready to be fierce.
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Bette, I left my comment at your blog for your wonderful poem.
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Monkheart, oh how that guardian can become the one who imprisons us if we are not careful. Thank you for this heartfelt prayer of searching for the true one, the genuine guardian.
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Beth, I left a comment at the Teahouse for you.
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stacy wills, such beautiful and powerful words, I was standing there on that threshold with her weighing in my mind the consequences of living into myself fully, knowing there will always be those behind me screaming that I need to carry something else with me for protection.
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These poems are so stunning, you have really taken the theme in such wonderful directions. Can’t wait to read more?
who guards the inner spaces
of my soul,
where the yeses and the no’s
of being
come to birth?
who sets the boundaries
for me,
or do they simply
merge into a nothingness of being
where the chaos unguarded
flows
to a torrent
force
spilling out
across the flood plains
of life…
she stood there on the threshold
holding open the screen door
contemplating the consequences should she
defy her mother’s edict to
“put your shoes on before you go outside!”
the sensation of bare feet on
weathered porch boards warmed by the sun
sealed her fate
this is what it feels like
to know my own mind, she thought
as the screen door slammed behind her
Watching my husband cooly
cope with my/not his 15 year old girl-child
out of control
out of the boundaries
enraged, lashing
humbles and steps me back from
my own edge.
Later
He and she are instep to instep
ready for engagement
the rules are pointed and brutish.
Learned from him,
I firmly step between and
slash the trance.
We live to love and do battle another day
Shelley, I have to second Carolyn; your poem really speaks to me!
Shelley – I love everything about your ‘lovely dragon’; she has great resonance for me.
The Guardian
My guardian
has become my jailer.
He won’t let go,
He feeds my ego.
O Liberator!
Come quickly.
I am weakening,
My breath short and shallow.
Come now, my Savior!
Fulfill your promise.
Accept my heart and soul,
Contrite, broken, humbled.
For you are my true Guardian,
Not me nor any other man.
You alone give life
To anyone who offers you his life.
All day and night
the ants pray the labyrinth
little peony monks
earnestly and patiently
believing in the bud.
Bette Norcross Wappner (b’oki)
My Lovely Dragon
Now I surprise myself
by voicing my fiesty “no’s”
and bold requests for help
no pussy footing around
with apologetic niceities
Who is this dragon woman?
And what did she do with
the all too gently kind woman
I used to be?
But this dragon lady within
Is clear and brash and wonderful
Funny and large, bitchy and real
I think I could get used to this….
She has warmth in her fire
And grace in her gutsiness
such goodness & grit
where in the hell has she been all these years?
Now I surprise my friends
But I’m tired of treading so lightly
the eggshells can be crushed as I walk
And I can be who I really am….