Welcome to our 44th Poetry Party!
I select an image and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your poems or other reflections. Add your responses in the comments section. 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)
Poetry Party Theme: Entering the Desert’s Fire
This week the Christian liturgical season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. For 40 days we are invited on an inner pilgrimage which parallels the desert journey Jesus made before he began his public ministry. In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures the desert is a place of preparing our hearts, of stripping away of false securities, of radical surrender, and of invitation to transformation. The Israelites wandered in the Sinai desert for 40 years and the early Christian monks went out into the desert to find a place of profound solitude and silence. The desert is an archetypal place where we confront our inner demons and are purified and transformed by the its heat.
I invite you this week to write a poem about your own invitation to enter the refiner’s fire – in alchemy lead is transformed into gold through heat and this becomes a metaphor for the human soul. What is the lead within you ready to be transformed into something treasured?
The poem could be a blessing for the journey ahead or an invocation of your deepest longings for this sacred time. Allow yourself to feel the desert heat as you write and invite in its power to spark, ignite, and illuminate the world.
50 Responses
Enter the Silence
If I could play the piano
I would serenade my soul
And listen to spaces in between
Where a few dare to go.
Silence speaks eloquent words
And starlit skies dance in vowels
A
E
I
O
U
Wisdom beckons a song
Of ancient ages past.
I ask
Will I go?
Chrysty – you may not consider yourself a poet – but you are one.
Our Desert
Vermilion suns
Vast purple nights
Raging dust storms
We inhabit a gentler land
Our sisters, the huge dancing evergreens
Spread their high bows
Shelter lush fern-rich undercover
We lie on the soft rain-blessed mosses
Stroke the white perfection of a trillium petal
Until She opens Her fierce lips
Blows down a torrent of lightning
Wind-shifting the forest into a cauldron of fire
A roaring inferno
A towering furnace of destruction
In its path
Every living creature runs wide-eyed with terror
Afterwards, the stench
The steaming graveyard of black trunks
Their feet resting in ashes, ashes
As do ours
This Ash Wednesday
But beneath our bare toes
Hundreds of tiny seeds
Throb with life
Each one a resurrection
And blessed be Her fierce lips
And blessed be the God of forest, fire, and seed
And blessed be the One Who stands with us
Barefoot in the ashes
I am new to this concept and I don’t consider myself a poet. I can only contribute what I am.
Lost
In the sandstorm of my sadness, I cannot hear.
Through the welling of my tears, I cannot see.
With the swelling of my tongue, I cannot taste.
On this heap of ashes, I cannot smell.
Under the oppression of my grief, I cannot feel.
God help me to become human once again.
Death Valley
my feet are tired now
and caked with pulverized stone.
with each exhalation
i become elemental
and lizard-like.
desert walking is harsh
and i look for the sowed luminescence
cast in salt by my ancestors.
they danced here.
cried here.
they communed with the gods
HERE
and became them.
and it was in this dry place
that i kicked into the world
cast in a papier-mache body
and formed by an unknown god.
my ancestors whisper
and tell me that the god chewed up paper
and rubbed spit with sand to create skin.
and then left me
to burn in the sun.
it’s an alchemical fire
and i wait to turn to gold —
comforted only by a bleached femur
of one who pushed into
the earth’s cracked face
in order to become it.
Dear Friends,
I wanted to share with you a reading list from Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord, compiled for a talk she gave on her artist’s journey. I am finding that so many people who I am learning from are connected, such as Christine and Jan Richardson. I would like to introduce Susan to this circle.
http://ingoodspirit.blogspot.com/2010/02/artists-journey-reading-list.html
Thank you all for your patience. I promise, no more posts on this topic.
To another Rachel (Rachel K) – Our poems must have made a connection. Yours was the only one that I copied off for my “Poetry Bank” before I even put mine up.
Here is my contribution – a photograph of the desert sun I took just last week in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, and a poem, titled Desert Sun.
http://www.seededearth.com/blog/national-parks/desert-sun
Burning
This one is ash and dust,
waiting for the wind
but before then I will burn
bright living, face turned
into the sun without fear
but laugh at the desert,
glowing with transformation,
and dance a whirlwind’s song
through rocks that will melt
at the heat of the passing
of this dust daughter: heart
bright and burning with divinity.
Thank you Christine for the invitation and challenge. I published my response here:
http://eventfulpoetry.com/2010/02/entering-the-refiners-fire/
As it’s short I’ll copy it into the comment too:
Entering the Refiner’s Fire:
What is it,
This relentless
Remorseless
Search for the
Blue light of
Truth
At the heart of the fire?
Why not just once,
Just this once,
Let yourself be
Warmed by its heat
Heartened by its glow
In awe of the dance and the flicker of the flame.
Just let yourself
Be
Yourself
Just let
Your
Self
~~~
Wouldn’t that
Be transformation
Enough?