What Is It That You Were Given?

What is it that you were given?
I mean from the loss.
After, what was taken.
that very thing, you could never live without.
The person or place;
the secret, or circumstance -
now that it is gone,
or has been found out,
and you can no longer call it foundation

what is it that you were given?

You know, and I know, this:
there is a hollowing out.
Something comes and opens you up

right
down
the
middle

and from that moment on
you are no longer immune to this world.

You wake, you wander,
every familiar, now a foreign.
You walk as through water
until you make it back to your bed
and finally, even there—
your sheets; your own pillow's scent different,
as if daily someone repaints your room, displaces something,
disturbs a cherished memento.

You see,
sometimes we are emptied.
We are emptied
because
Life wants us to know
so
much
more
Light.

- Em Claire

Rise Together

It's a beautiful time to be alive.
And the long walk home is peopled --
We, are everywhere.
Yet the struggle to surrender is where we often walk alone.
So the next time you fall, look
to either side where you lie
and take the hand
of your dear Brother or Sister
whose own face is muddied.
We can rise together,
even if we fall alone --
for it's a beautiful time to be alive
even
on this long walk home.

- Em Claire

Orchid Poems

Treasure
Lips, soft as petals, rarefied as undiscovered
Wild orchids.

Hair, threads of gold gathered, woven, mined
From secret caves.

Eyes, that fell from violet skies landing on new
Isles of azure.

Skin, so salmon flecked, subtle, delicate, solas,
Destination.

Your body is buried cask and gilded keeper
Of jewels and flame, whispers, searing cold,
Blue fires untamed—

Lush, fertile wanderings, colourful birds, sweeping
Moon, pools of sorrows and light, trees branching,
Pleasures keen, crushing delights without name.

 - Ormond



Orchid
Deep in the valley, a beauty hides:
Serene, peerless, incomparably sweet.
In the still shade of the bamboo thicket
It seems to sigh softly for a lover.

 - Taigu Ryokan



The Orchid Flower
Just as I wonder
whether it's going to die,
the orchid blossoms

and I can't explain why it
moves my heart, why such pleasure

comes from one small bud
on a long spindly stem, one
blood red gold flower

opening at mid-summer,
tiny, perfect in its hour.

Even to a white-
haired craggy poet, it's
purely erotic,

pistil and stamen, pollen,
dew of the world, a spoonful

of earth, and water.
Erotic because there's death
at the heart of birth,

drama in those old sunrise
prisms in wet cedar boughs,

deepest mystery
in washing evening dishes
or teasing my wife,

who grows, yes, more beautiful
because one of us will die.

 - Sam Hamill

Behind Naming, Beneath Words...

Behind naming, beneath words, is something else. An existence named unnamed and unnameable. We give the grass a name, and earth a name. We say grass and earth are separate. We know this because we can pull the grass free of the earth and see its separate roots — but when the grass is free, it dies. We say the inarticulate have no souls. We say the cow’s eye has no existence outside ourselves, that the red wing of the blackbird has no thought, the roe of the salmon no feeling, because we cannot name these.

Yet for our own lives we grieve all that cannot be spoken, that there is no name for, repeating for ourselves the names of things which surround what cannot be named. We say Heron and Loon, Coot and Killdeer, Snipe and Sandpiper, Gull and Hawk, Eagle and Osprey, Pigeon and Dove, Oriole, Meadowlark, Sparrow. We say Red Admiral and Painted Lady, Morning Cloak and Question Mark, Baltimore and Checkerspot, Buckeye, Monarch, Viceroy, Mayfly, Stonefly, Cicada, Leafhopper and Earwig, we say Sea Urchin and Sand Dollar, Starfish and Sandworm.

We say mucous membrane, uterus, cervix, ligament, vagina and hymen, labia, orifice, artery, vessel, spine and heart. We say skin, blood, breast, nipple, taste, nostril, green, eye, hair, we say vulva,  hood, clitoris, belly, foot, knee, elbow, pit, nail, thumb, we say tongue, teeth, toe, ear, we say ear and voice and touch and taste and we say again love, breast and beautiful and vulva, saying clitoris, saying belly, saying toes and soft, saying ear, saying ear, saying ear, ear and hood and hood and green and all that we say we are saying around that which cannot be said, cannot be spoken.

But in a moment that which is behind naming makes itself known. Hand and breast know each one to the other: Wood in the table knows day in the bowl. Air knows grass knows water knows mud knows beetle knows frost knows sunlight knows the shape of the earth knows death knows not dying. And all this knowledge is in the souls of everything, behind naming, before speaking, beneath words.

 - Susan Grififn from "Woman and Nature"