Wednesday, January 30, 2013

inheritance

This ruined garden
begs for your spark.
Recognize the Beloved
face of your heart
in its wild and constant
light. Somewhere
here your treasure
lingers, waiting for
you to understand the
puzzling rune, to
inherit the silent
castle, to love
the lonesome shard
on the cold and
empty floor.

©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Mary Street


Walking home alone
in the electric sheen
of post-thunderstorm
April evening,
the night is lambent
with reawakened moonlight;
the street is tossed
with foolish bits
of flying energy
released from
pre-storm torpor
by the punk
of lightning’s sulphur,
by the voice of thunder
in these mountains.
Branches arc
across the streetside,
narrow dark curves
of dispossessed tree
flung down from
home by wind.
Leaves, like paper-thin mice
with brains made
frantic by rain,
hurry past,
their voices the sylvan inheritance
of each season’s violence,
done to trees:
the pressure of ice
in winter,
its weight on branches
in leafless stillness,
the intemperate blasts of spring,
as cold air gives
way to warm,
as frost is displaced
by the small
bright fires of
growth in wood.
I recall the August blasting
of a favorite white oak by lightning:
A ravaged ash
alone in a dry field,
a scorched sentinel
made electricity’s victim.
Then autumn’s disavowal
of green, its dismantling
of that cloak
of shuddering chlorophyll,
its dispersal of color
into earth,
the souls of sweetgums
made ready
for the ascetic
winter lives of owls
and sleeping creatures,
each naked branch
a voiceless prayer
of restoration
and of pagan grace.

©Laura Sorrells 1996
all rights reserved

Friday, January 25, 2013

the story

The solitary fire
you travel with
knows the story
I chase. It
brings me the password
of transformation; it
mends the bones
of my wildness.
Hungry for its
beggar's whisper,
I wait for the refuge
of its reach:
ready,
trembling,
grateful,
replete with
the shock of Love.

©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

Monday, January 21, 2013

This Book


This book is a paper sailboat careening into the spires of cypress knees.
This book is a barn burning, erasing the beams that stood in front of the big yellow moon.
This book is a microscope, rescued from a box in the attic of your childhood.
This book is a tender young beech leaf yearning to know the sun.
This book is a grandfatherly archetype, playing games with magic in the middle of the night.
This book is a wanderer. It likes to go places without names, places in between the places on the maps.
This book is neither a telegram nor a text message.
This book is a skinny bear emerging from the grotto in the forest, hungry for grubs and cat food.
This book is an alligator’s leg pushing away from logs in the courtyard pond.
This book is a wild thing trying to be tame.
This book is something like a mystery or a riddle. Its pages are neither gray nor blue. They carry a texture like depth, a seriousness that gets behind language and shoves it around.
This book is a foxtail with a bristly tip, given as a gift.
This book is a cloud of brown-headed cowbirds full of corn and winter.
This book is a travelogue, a clumsy try at keeping track of all the ways to talk to people in between the towns of Appalachia.
This book is a city skyline bristling with bridges.
This book is a bridge tagged with blue.
This book is the furl of tarpaulin beneath the bridge, a rectangle of chill in January.
This book is a labyrinth, a web of careful bricks edged with stiff tufts of leftover grass.
This book is an empty suit of armor on display in a place where no one knows its story.
This book is a carpenter’s cat’s paw with nothing to nudge loose from beams or siding.
This book is the slender bleachy jawbone of a fox or dog, found settling into tar on the traintracks near Talking Rock Creek.
This book is a mug of jasmine tea, remembering how sweet it was to be a flower.
This book is the place where poems go to be alone when no one wants to read them.
This book is a monocle, always hot from starting tiny fires in checkout lines.
This book is the big old wind that tears down limbs from oak trees and sings to itself in the cove.
This book is cousin to the Eastern Forest Field Guide under the seat in the truck.
This book is a superhero’s diary, full of hyperbole and mischief.
This book is the unwritten thing that has no synonym, no nomenclature to show itself to others. It sings its little song of consolation. It whistles past the graveyard in the moonlight. It is a cliché, a cannonball, a memorized stanza from high school, an excuse, an homage, a playground, and a whisper. It got lost once but found its way back with nothing missing. You looked and looked, expecting to see a chunk of font cut away from the middle with someone’s tiny scissors, but everything was there, all the words that courted you and made you write them down for some unspoken reason you aren’t sure exists.
This book is all topography, all raised edges showing you what to see and how to get around it.
This book knows your name but won’t say it.
This book is the last story you’ll ever need: a simpleness, a foundling, a caress, a stumble, a woodsplitter, a pillow, a koan, a dream half-remembered in the morning, a plate of scrambled eggs with lots of pepper, an afterthought, a raincoat, a weathervane, a kiss.

-----©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

Sunday, January 20, 2013

everything left

Your intoxicating Silence
tells me things
I have always
wanted. Whatever
intimacy I turned to
hurries away from me now.
Everything left is
melting into
praise, into
the happy work
of becoming
whole.

©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved


Tuesday, January 8, 2013

only

My heart has
become the
exultant disciple
of your
thirst. No
mantra, no
movement, no
author. Only
this sweet
desert, this
family of
fire, this
breath.

©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

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About Me

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Georgia, United States
I live at the edge of the forest in a little town in the north Georgia mountains. I teach sixth grade Language Arts and am writing a memoir of sorts about family, spirituality, and narrative. I am also exploring a possible writing project having to do with contemporary lay contemplative experience and how it might be informed by the Desert Fathers and Mothers of early Christianity. I am a relatively recent convert to Roman Catholicism and an admirer of Pope Francis, Leonardo Boff, Joan Chittister, and Richard Rohr. I'm a Lay Associate of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery in Conyers, Georgia. I am interested in indigenous cultures, narratives, and spirituality, especially how these can inform my spirituality as a lay contemplative. I write, read, take pictures, play around with creating ephemera from paper and cloth and other organic things. I cook, hike, watch wildlife, and collect random bits of interesting oddness, both tangible and abstract. I am a seer of smallness and a caretaker of ridiculous minutiae. If you want, e-mail me at riverrun67@gmail.com or lksorrells@hotmail.com.