I Am She
The story the sea told me
Lay open on the table
As I busied myself a perimeter around its truths
Always a wide berth
To protect my earthly longing
My trademark belonging
That makes me me
But not to the sea
To her, I am soluble
Like ink to water
Salt-scrubbed from pages
Happy to be free
To her, I am she
© H. Hennenburg, 30 September 2019
Joyfully linking with Poets & Storytellers United.
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“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Legend
Legend comes after the fall
Rocketing on wings sooted with truth
Imagining bravely a new world
Jettisoned stocks of mislaid deeds
Lie crumpled in the garden
A masterful affair torn to wilds
And reclaimed by its own natural temperament
Bastions slated for oblivion
Rise to a new mantle
Humility spilling itself from rivers of love
Whose currents authored our passage
In this our new genesis
We blanket the sky
Freed from our stories
Alive with presence
Soul sounding endless reverberations
Of light made song
A resonant throng after the fall
© H. Hennenburg, 28 November 2019
Joyfully linking with Poets United.
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Equal
Equal to the task
I’m born into the moment singing
Faithful to the star careening,
Lungs full, to my depth
And rising up from toe to sternum
Wishes cast their words
I heard them whisper while I wept
All my truths unto the stardom
Echo fast and full and far, come home
I am the question that you ask
And I am equal to the task
© H. Hennenburg, 9 December 2019
A song incomplete, but the verse came pure to my heart after reading a pure heart in Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) In Song by Sara Bareilles.
…all we ever seek is within us.
Joyfully linking with Poets United.
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Washed Ashore
Washed ashore
I think of you
And the many times
You tried the landing
Echoing absences
Dot the shallows
Of what might have been for you
But for me,
I am here
Waterlogged and foreign
Time crawling out of my skin
And abandoning me to gravity
And as I become part of the landscape
I wonder now
What becomes of you?
© H. Hennenburg, 6 July 2019
This poem was originally inspired by a painting I admired while wandering through a summer farm and craft market. The artist, Isabel Gibson, was lovely and had many interesting stories of the coastal and pastoral settings depicted in her paintings. Nature inspires art, art inspires poetry, poetry inspires love, love inspires life…and we are cycled and recycled over and again.
Joyfully linking with Poets United.
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Wings To The Firmament
Our first instinct is air
We are casualties of longing thereafter
Oscillating on currents
That paint us red
And conspire to wake our dormancy
Jostling and cajoling
Skyward blooms unfolding with majesty
All that holds us aloft
In a universe unremitting
We are want and unwitting
Wings to the firmament
© H. Hennenburg, 29 November 2019
For Bill and for bookmarks. 🛩️
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While There Is Still Time
Now…while there is still time…
while there are still words
Now…when we meet in passing and are in the same space
for the first time…and for the last
Lift your head, fair one,
for there is no tomorrow that will hold this…either the sweetness or the sorrow
Tomorrow will steal in on a breeze that blows beyond our knowing,
and you will turn around and all will be forgotten.
And glowing within you will be only the love and honour and truth of your original light
And if I live, it will be only in the life that I give to you…And I will say,
“it was mine to give, and thus I gave it”
© H. Hennenburg, 28 November 2007
Joyfully linking to Poets United.
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Of Noble Beasts
This dream
Has made of me its signature
The water that binds us
Is the blue-black ink
That fastens me
To parchment parched
And crumbling under weight of liquidity
I am the scant scion of noble beasts
Who remember me in their churning frenzy
To feed – as all must do
I am the way through
The conduit to sustenance unending
The mind of creation wending its way
To truth
We are peerless
We are the dreamer warring with itself
Killers saddled with irony
Armed with love
A sea raging with determination
To awaken
© H. Hennenburg, 19 November 2019
Joyfully linking to Poets United.
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Lodestar
I did not expect the brittle cry
Rising out from the mana
Voice breaking
Rheumy eyes discomposed
Lodestar
Shining with defiance
You are beckoning me to serve
Your consonant hoof-falls
Spreading their alchemy
Irrupting the gnosis with idyll wiles
I did not take the path of forgetting
I rose from the water astride your back
Never tossed in the tides of time
I glistened with moonlight
And showed you the scars I would accrue
My deep sea flesh waiting
For the universe within to round on us
© H. Hennenburg, 1 November 2019
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Destiny
There is a way up the hillside
But the peak is treacherous
And the descent, often, involuntary
Mortals call the attempt death defying
Angels, recruitment
You will know you have arrived
When you are filled with purpose
And destiny is in the wind
This is where you should watch your step
The world will push
The heavens will pull
You will see only impossible choices
Then, the wind will rise
© H. Hennenburg, 8 November 2019
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Improbable Wings
A cool rush of flagrant defiance
Unlocks a chain of misdemeanors
That fall from my tongue in a fevered cadence
My soliloquy goes uncharted
In this forest of layered beasts
Whose fragrant alliance has put me up to the mischief
I have fallen at the feet
Of one cleansing breath
That has choked the life from subjugation to rules that loathe exceptions
And I have taken flight on improbable wings
© H. Hennenburg, 19 October 2019
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