Wendy Jeanne Burch Poetry: 2009

January 24, 2007 3 AM

SLEEPLESS DREAMER

She finds herself awake, in the middle of each night, hoping to find beauty in the dark room, afraid of falling asleep. This is the way she will find her way out of the night, climb the small tunnel to breathe in the sea and the fresh breeze. For years she has lived in light and beauty, dark and away…all the love and the original Gift.

Now is the time, when all is still and close. Flower blooms sad under the moon, its heart pounding for fear of finding itself alive and beautiful. Strange night blossom in the depths of the still. Chasing down dreams that she is actress in a play and cannot remember the songs. And the audience waits to hear her sing. She is to go out on stage next, the story is there somewhere.. She searches for the pages, for the books or people who know the words. She is ready to go on, and is dispossessed. In a sweat and she awakens away and the play continues without her, again.

The rain still does not come day after day. Cold sun hits her face and reveals the next day another chance to find the true sound, the words, the melody.

In dreams last night there were golden fish, gigantic and beautiful, who have somehow gone astray from their own water. They are lying on their sides in shallow puddles on tables and floors, and she tries to find a place where they can swim and still be free, where the water is right. The warmth, the tiny perfect cycle. She must save the beauty or die with them and without, find a place where they can have the sea.

This is the way she will save the life given all those who swim in a gentle heart, who gasp for water and find only air, air, air, and are drowning in the dark air. Every word and world will be a spiral upward, every morning is indeed a day that will not end this way again. Every morning a prayer.

Dear One, do not forsake this lady of the dark dry air, this ghost who wakes alive in your arms and gasping for you, and by the end of the day is all a struggle. Sweet, Sweet One, surround and raise your flower up under the moon. Moon child gasping for water, dear One, see her now and reveal the Sea.

January 25, 2007

ROOM OF DREAMS

She steals away into the next night, secret meeting with herself and the stars, and the turning of the wheels, moving the waters into a resolve for lingering with the dark tank full of fish, sound of an old heater struggling out warmth into a cool night.

And how shall we get there this night, into the room of dreams, she asks as she wipes the moisture from her face, her body, her hands and feet. Sleep is such shadowy work in times when the silence of an empty house, no comforting snore of a dog lulling her mind. The time had come for even the dog and her doggish heart yearns and worries over so many possible souls she will hold in her small hands

And who will come while her lover sleeps turns and groans once out in the dark room beyond a door, tiptoes toward another dream where an angel might enter, and the smile forms on her face, anticipation for a visitation from those who live in there.

But it must be in sleep when the soul flies over the roofs of houses and trees, somersaulting like a puppy in the air held in that embrace joy and more joy love and more love and that dream when the blessed One stepped through the dark dissolving walls and met her with shimmering night light more than stars and hopes, more than peace and the gold of the coming sun, placed at her feet a bouquet of flowers, picked from the gardens of gods, and as she knelt, he left silent and serenely radiant

A meeting with silences as the humming continues, she is sure there is no more sound in this silent night than she has ever witnessed. A wind of sound brushes past her ears, and there is no stilling the voices of such invisible things. Electric winds moving past her on this beach of dark sands, crystal thoughts, and leaving behind.

She awaits to hear the breathing of her love as she re-enters the chamber, the small groan which will tell her there is life and truly, truly! The night adjourns and she walks naked under sands and stars and mounds of blankets wet with skin and the smell of earth. As she tiptoes away with the tiny trickle of finch voices still in her mind, snuggling in nests outside the shade, breathing, dreaming the dreams of the whole world.

AWAKE AT THE WHEEL
March 8, 2007

She wonders if during that time, when the world stood still and her life was over, if someone looked at her face as she was now looking at the woman in the car, passing her and never returning…. If during that time, she had seen the face of the Christ. On the cross…. Yes, there.

This is not an every day face. Not just a small bad day. Someone has died on the Mount, Someone is going to pass and be entombed. Someone who was everything to someone, was going to shift out from this life forever. Someone’s life would change as in a dream. Someone would begin the Journey back from broken soul and mind
to Resurrection

Today she saw that face a mirror from years ago in a stranger’s and understood the familiar
That someone must have seen it then when she felt her life was ended and angels were everywhere
When it was her face
When that stranger wept

March 11, 2007

NAKED

Naked in the night, she sits in a small room and awaits sleep once more, as if it were a beloved stranger who might creep in and put her under a spell. Slowly, the Angel in her who slept all day is now awake at 2:30. Why does she keep such unholy hours?

Memory of the dream comes flooding, the earth shaking violently, taking its breath, and trembling again and again. Stops and begins and the walls between her and the others begin to open up and expose them all. Comforting her new puppy, in her arms and her love. The land is tearing apart, someone says, and again the trembling earth abides. But in the terror something beautiful comes; a rift in the every day granted.

Oh Angel, I know you are there, she prays. You cannot hide from me all day long and come and awaken me at this hour. But you do, because there is love always and yet I name you, Angel of the Night, “Despair”. Do this for me, do this for them, be you we know so well and so little time and on and on with your belief in my spirit You should have given her a little bit more.

So many who await the hallowed aurora, the rise and the meeting of stars and black holes and the stars refuse to fall, to send any sign of good luck or portent and yet the Beauty reigns as she chants the name of a God she read about once and who has always answered her prayer

Whether naked or silent she shouts out loud so that she may hear herself in this sky of jewels as she hangs on the whole night and quakes again.

April 11, 2007

FINCH GRIEF

When did the tiny bird suddenly discover the small opening, a way to the sky. Did he understand he would be without family or Mother, and where is he tonight, in some tree higher than any sky he dreamed. She called to him when she realized he was gone, such a tiny light, and the whole world seemed to listen. The birds tossed across the hills, screeching and calling. Was he watching. Listening.

Wild bird suddenly appears, sits on a branch over her head and stares as if to say and she speaks to the messenger, and through her, a message to her own small one, now winged and lost as if to say I know where your love is, and I will fly now and tell him you are calling, she lifts into the sky, to a lofty distant redwood as the sleepless lady follows him with her soul

How far does the arm of love reach distance the smallest creation can soar the tiny circle of events and messages from angels and beings just there next to us invisible not needing to be seen but visualized nonetheless we call upon all great things at this hour of gathering as she once again stares into the silent dark morning sound of rain drops move across the land, and for a moment she thought might have heard the peck of a homecoming bird just outside the window a dark morning shower sent to water the whole world with loss

She lies down again beside love and prayer, hand on her belly as the light moves through and erases thought spirited into the sky, from tree to tree searching, calling to the small and simple love set free. Sleep now, lover, sleep, and remember when you were once winged and discovered the highest branch and the stars

May 19, 2007

CHRYSALIS

In the chrysalis, she swims inside the hard shell of perhaps and surely, caught between walls she must have built, in the white soup of miracle, and waits. Reaches for the point of light which seems to be within the wings and the body, deep within the forever of being whatever she was born to become and oh!

Here in the shell, camouflaged and seemingly safe, a wing begins to form. It is so fragile, and the chance of survival is thin then the light as one tentacle reaches for a small opening in the heart of the divine container

Her day to day has become so full and empty and the still of forming this mystery quickens her mind in the damp night when thoughts come to a watery lull and the other sounds can be heard as a whisper and a memory of the blur of beauty

Soon she will fly toward what she was and what she knows she must be and choices to unfold the fragile silk will pervade the pre-dawn life until there is finally no turning

Ears stopped in order to keep out the world’s clamour she can hear the beating of her own heart, the breath and the ache of every and all

What will become of the tiny black and red, where will the soup emerge and form, and how. All the world and the sky await to find this one life as it sighs with first light

In the chrysalis, all is still and an explosion is just over its own horizon in the gentle steady push, she finds a burst of fresh green and sun in the middle of the breathless night There is hope and there is awaiting in the very present of the eyes of every thing the old woman claims to imagine things now the new child inside the older child inside the ever opening mystery and she tiptoes back into the silent cocoon for a more forgiving hour of sleep.

June 1, 2007

FROM BETWEEN THE CLOUDS AT 35,000 FEET

Veil upon veil, she stares out the airplane window at the layers, finds herself floating within a deep sea of coral or glaciers, or the Lost Horizon, realizes that her vision is suddenly as a child Webs of gray and icy white mountains and her within them giddy and lost a dislocation of sense and place And she thinks, some days she can hear music as if for the first time again, each note and chord and story as part of the body and the heavens as they swoon within the Light Can see conjuring in the glance of a tree or bird or a gigantic white primrose in the head of a cloud and she soars from above enraptured in such moment everything interrupted for this celestial hour except for the clouds below in love again with the natural force of Being and she greets them all as if this were some gift from some profound perfection of plan and the waiting world below a message

Is it all here now, because she is about to Die or Live, or Die and Live? Bump of the plane as they move into the dense white and it would be good today in a fearless surrender

And then, not anymore as if she were watching these visions
but as if they were watching her

DAY OF WINGS

Do you see it now
And who would have thought –
Wings! Each presence presenting
Giving the Holy Finger
Passing in the right hand lane
Taking out the garbage, planting the seed,
Hammering the nail, drawing the shade
Born Being Here Dying
All were We & They
The crescent stars
Even the flocks, an extra flurry
Of Wings
So how could we argue anyone
Nor lost, nor despair
They who thought
& so it made me laugh – Wings!

Visible to bodies,
Winged Mother Father,
Dog, Cat, Deer
Snake, enemy, friend
Winged Lovers
Everything had ended
But the open Wings
Everywhere
Do you see it
Now.

FOR CAROL

Why, today instead of tears, did she cry blood? Was it because there are no tears left, that water does not say enough, that even rivers of blood do not say enough for this sadness and did I miss my chance to say damn it, cry, scream if you must or you’ll bleed it and it will take your life from you for an hour or a day my friend did I fail you or did I allow you to release your river of blood into the trees and did the beauty of your love and the redwoods finally ease you finally cradle you in its all gentle embrace
your deep and true sadness your loss and your greatness in such a startling life! as you have been given as you continue to give even your blood to the world

WHAT LOVE

Yes, she is now willing to come back. To gallop freely to this place of pain and incredible beauty, to this place of tears, tyranny, injustice, devouring demons, and angels. It was the Angels who saved her earthly or unearthly and in this circle of doubt back to square one she goes, and goes, and the moon passes over the sun the stars show meanings unknown to anyone how could she know anything the planets just jewels and gems and ways to encircle the rift

She is not special She is not famous She knows nothing. She is talented, but there are others who do that better There are others who came here knowing they could do it best and that is not her what stands out is the way souls respond, need of a letter or a touch the way the animals constantly come in a Noah’s Ark of messages for the future of Humans and all beings who came here who chose here and no where else who chose to suffer to be tools and channels to learn when to listen and when to stop and when to go forward and make such memorable mistakes. And to listen again….She is her own Sacred Contract.

She is not the best of the best. But she was given the best of the best. And looking upon them, she sees herself. She is Jesus, Mary Magdalen, St. Theresa, Kwannon, Krishna, Buddha, she is the dirt and the sky. Some days she feels just like dirt and some days she feels just like everlasting Sky.

She is She. Or He, or anything with such a likeness. Those who despise her and those who fear or love her, those whose gentle touch are a spring of pure water, and those whose fumbled touch are a gift to remember or poison as all the blood flows down into the water to purify

She is her enemy; she is her own best friend and the sky. Her hands are a face. Look at these hands. They are her face. Hold them up to the Light. They are the face of what she will return to the face of what she endured willingly and unwillingly, what beauty, what beauty

What Love.

October 6, 2007

January 8, 2008

Dreams in the Storms

She starts with the shadows, incredible beauty, as the shadows of birds, and trees, and the stars, move across the roads and the land as she looks to the ground instead of the skies. The shadows moving, animated, become the thing, spirits in daylight revisited from the night before out of the corner of her eye, shadows, and is it sentience or grace

And then there are the rains, as they finally come, in days of thunder and floods, and to resist would be madness, as the rain spirits come and dance and defy her sense of hair and face and tolerance for disarray she is diminished but alive

And the dreams in the storms. Her warm water fish suddenly dumped by someone in a library, out onto the ground, and the way they make their ways, amphibians suddenly, to a higher ground of waterfalls and pools, and she watches, helpless, and she notices too the predatory ones waiting

Or the childlike being she saw in another dream, a cartoon, whose elder came and tossed something at the little one, and walked away forever, and this little penguin said in return, and in hope, “see you on corner 9” And what was this The deep sadness such a silly dream would bring to her…. And she awakened weeping and could not sleep again

And yet in the rain, in the cold, it is Spring in her mind and though still sometimes sleepless, she manages the time with prayers for everyone she has ever known and loved or feared and each night a resolution of true self and she remembers beings who have been completely in love with God, ecstatics, and tries to remember when she was one of them and the next day arrives and waits her fingernails and hands rough and worn like her soul

And the children, how they suffer The ones she loves the most, none from her own womb, but so much a part they cut themselves and try to leave the universe and cannot but the realities of being born into yet another life where no one knows anything somehow too much to bear and so she hears the call of all the souls of children who have ever lived

And the word, dwell. A simple word, perhaps a code comes…. Deep well, a dwelling within her where all greatness, grace, and goodness lives.

Finally sleep comes and she hears a car leave in the driveway…. Her beloved. And she says a prayer for his protection. And all is silent but for the humm of the aquarium, snore of her dog, and the sound of her own breathing beneath the waters.

Wendy Jeanne Burch Poetry

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