a walkabout

Tasting the scent of root,
I become the sea.
There is an art to this.
A vast interiority
makes me curious. Barefoot
all day, I remember
my alignment with the tides.
I attend to the patterned world
beyond the dichotomies
of the question.
This is no easy task. Crickets
call to the East.
Who knows
when a walkabout
begins?

©Laura Sorrells 2010
some rights reserved

I wrote this found poem in 2010 using Laura Sewall's amazing and compelling book Sight and Sensibility: the Ecopsychology of Seeing. I had lost the notebook I wrote it in and only found it the other day. I am excited about this, because it's full of things I wrote that I thought I might never see again.

something here

Attention
is learning
to serve
mystery, to
become willing to
wander, to
be lost.
It stretches,
rises,
making palpable
the elusive mythology
of pine and shore,
of grove and meadow.
The native furniture
of evening
returns, blue
and simple.
Something here
has always wanted this
nothing, this
limen, this
fire.

Story

It’s all about the troll who lives under the bridge; the girl without a father; the boy with a third eye hidden in his forehead, a radiant liquid gem, the color of rubies.

It’s about the black bear by the bloodroot on Sunday: the moment of revelation in the rainy garden, right next to the sagging tomato cage and just behind the single aisle of shaggy sunflowers.

It’s about wanting something you can’t have, and about wanting nothing much at all.

It’s about the secret recipe for catfish chowder that came out of that August day on the hidden lake, two generations ago, when the big whiskered fish gave himself up and throngs of hungry people ate for days.

It is, in fact, about being fed, and about feeding the hungry.

It’s about the dispensation of clues without coercion, the unspoken urgency in how things might have been but never were.

It’s about getting off the country road and pulling in behind that old sedan with blue steam rising from its continent of hood, and then about what happens next: kindness, conversation, redemption, a shift : a chance to tell a different story, later, this time.

--©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved

This is a version of something I wrote in 2007 when I was in graduate school and planning a research project on the importance of narrative writing in the middle school curriculum. I am far from satisfied with it, but I think it contains a seed or two I may be able to use.

this vigil

Follow this powerful silence
faithfully.
Wherever you listen,
your receptive heart
will always find
the persistent disciple this
vigil reveals:
love, holy in its
blush of perfect
humility,
a psalm of ordinary
reverence,
translating grace into
a gentle, compassionate
feast.

I got this found poem from the Rule of Benedict. I make lists of words that speak to me from these sources and then pull them together. I put this one together yesterday while sitting by Talking Rock Creek.

a recipe of whisper

Sometimes
the warm hum
of a quiet wind
lights an empty field
with a recipe
of whisper.

Anything sings
when you let it.

--lks March 2012

This is a found poem I culled from Maurice Manning's book of poetry, Bucolics. 

the singing of light

And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way a sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered frozen from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant's body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire! Get away from me. Come closer.

--Mary Oliver, from West Wind