Commitment Archives - hennenburg.com

Last One Standing

Posted on 16 August 2020 by H. Hennenburg

Last One Standing

I see you
Living some hard truths
But living
Knowing that light creeps in
When injustice is done
Drawn to the will of the one
Who goes on loving
Because light attracts light
And love is uninjurable

I see you
Drowsy with pain and indignity
Bearing the weight…again
Leaving the door open
For the light to creep in
Because it is beyond your assailants’ reach
No matter how deep they are willing to slide
They don’t know what you can abide
And what you won’t

I see you
The truth in you alights the truth in me
Unites the will of love to be
The last one standing

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Mercy

Posted on 3 July 2020 by H. Hennenburg

Mercy

Mercy
You have arrested my tongue to ply it with honey
To coat my throat with sweet balm
You have named this day
The ever after
And I am after
Ever increasing bouts of you

Mercy
You are my secret sorceress conjuring relief
Release from the warrior’s way
I will not fight for love
Love would never have it
Love is in our habits of grace
Not in the way we face our demons

Mercy
You have stayed my sword
And my shield of armour undone
Tonight
I am a babe upon the altar for you
For love will not falter
And hope will abide

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Dear Dr. Angelou

Posted on 31 May 202021 June 2020 by H. Hennenburg

It is a frustrating irony that my heart finds nothing worth writing about other than the painful, bloody fight for equality (still) raging in the US; and at the same time, my heart is too filled with anger, grief and tension to find words to write.

Here is one attempt. Just a few words that could not find completion written in the days following the release of the video of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder. I was born and raised in Georgia, and I think this is a sort of proclamation that we do not have to become what our social environment and our history might dictate.

Dear Dr. Angelou

Somehow
a global pandemic
and the war against “other”
have become bedfellows
And the place of my birth
is synonymous with murder…again…

And yet, I love

15 May 2020

For too long, it has been the challenge of people of colour to rise in spite of a system rigged against them. White people, please, we must learn to love humanity more than we love privilege.

Linking with Poets & Storytellers United.

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Where Shall We Ramble

Posted on 12 April 2020 by H. Hennenburg

Where Shall We Ramble?

River, where do you ramble?
In deep woods we meet
Inside a secret
That floats softly
From my tongue
Into your current

When I was a child
I plunged to your depths
And mingled with the watery spirits there
I rolled frantically like a pinwheel
Seeking purchase
Until invisible hands
Planted my feet in your muddied bed

I rose like a crooked cannon
Doubled over and ready to launch the remains of my burning breath
In violent exchange for a greedy gasp of the remains of my days
Which have led me here
Banking on your shoulder
Coming up short for time
Leaning in for invisible hands
And finding none

Here, I am the sacred one
I am become my own saviour
So pray you, River
Where shall we ramble?

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Love Ingrained

Posted on 21 March 2020 by H. Hennenburg

Image by Tom Hauk illustrating poem by H. Hennenburg — Image by Tom Hauk

Love Ingrained

Under what weather
Do we seed our assurances
That love is ingrained?
A crop sown with forthright intention
And raised up of its own accord
To feed the masses
As if by rote

Under what weather
Do we seek shelter
In a sworn harvest
Bent on life
And suffused with the joy of being?
A graceless teeming
Of love ingrained

To R & H who love fiercely. ❤️

Joyfully linking with Poets & Storytellers United.

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Insides Out

Posted on 21 February 2020 by H. Hennenburg

Consciousness seeks to nurture a deeper truth of being while the world wrestles confusion, tedium and opposing extremes.

Insides Out

From a precipice of reversals
I envisage realities stained by a confusion of tedium
I know only this: I am extant
Belly exposed – gnawed open by hunger for the interior
For a collusion of continuum that sees insides out
I am stable in my rudimentary way, but I reach…
I reach for the magma of understanding
Singeing my extremities
Vapourizing foundations
Reducing me to sediment
My core extracted
Gravitational lore exacted
On light of becoming

Joyfully linking with Poets & Storytellers United.

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Accord

Posted on 21 January 2020 by H. Hennenburg

Accord

I find the centre path
My eyes smouldering with exhaustion
I tell you I am here of my own accord
Then pluck my eyes out and retire
I am no more bound to the maelstrom
No more a rat in the labyrinth proving my worth
I have scattered my pennies
For their rat-tat-tat
On the glistening white floors
And danced to their rhythm
Until my soles bled
My red fortune spattered and spilt
I hand you the hilt
And plunge myself thus to eternity
If I pierce the fabric
We have staged a coup
And I am bound with you
Into the margins

Joyfully linking with Poets & Storytellers United.

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Rendered

Posted on 18 January 2020 by H. Hennenburg

When we open ourselves to the truth and power of nature and light, we are resolved to the same truth and power within ourselves.

Rendered

A sylvan dream requites our arrival
Permeating gold ablution washes over giants
Reaching us in strands
Vestiges of brilliance painting our skin
We are but miscreants and maladies
An opus dissonant and wistful
Resolved and replete by respiring light
We are sublimating, reintegrating
Syncopated selves dissipating fleet
Into amorphic jubilance rendered

Joyfully linking with Poets & Storytellers United.

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Equal

Posted on 14 December 2019 by H. Hennenburg

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

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

Posted on 7 December 20197 December 2019 by H. Hennenburg

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?

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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