Love is life is freedom is truth is joy.
Life Unto Life
A seed is planted in my mind
Cracked open just enough to sprout
Awaiting the journey from hull to sunlight
It is a grand thing – this bloom in situ
Encased in idea
On a precipice of potential
Red and gold dusting the edges of desire
Desire that coaxes and yearns and unites
Life unto life
© H. Hennenburg, 13 April 2021
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2021 H. Hennenburg
Arboreal
I, Animalia
Weary on forest floor
Eyes sweeping the canopy
For jagged shards of light
Your black relief of limbs
Stretch into the all-directions
And I am made simple by my wanting
Only for this life exchange
Only for your reach
As I exhale
© H. Hennenburg, 27 January 2021
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2021 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
© H. Hennenburg, 10 August 2019
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2020 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
© H. Hennenburg, 14 July 2019
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2020 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.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2020 H. Hennenburg
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
© H. Hennenburg, 9 March 2019
To R & H who love fiercely. ❤️
Joyfully linking with Poets & Storytellers United.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2020 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
© H. Hennenburg, 11 January 2020
Joyfully linking with Poets & Storytellers United.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2020 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
© H. Hennenburg, 20 December 2019
Joyfully linking with Poets & Storytellers United.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2020 H. Hennenburg
“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.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2019 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
© 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.
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2019 H. Hennenburg
Riders of the Tempest: The Story of WE
by H. Hennenburg
There is no “I”. There is no “you.” There is only WE. “Reality is in the possibilities,” and Riders of the Tempest is a quest for the heart of what can be.
This collection of poems by H. Hennenburg tells the story of WE. Born from Supernova, we bear the imprint of the universe: the mandate to expand. Gripped by a deep yearning, we march into a tempest…a great storm…a war between our desire to expand as individuals and our desire to expand into the truth of our oneness. We believe we are mere “echoes to the sea and gathering storm,” but there is more to the universe than what we see. We are “more than the caged experience of sight.” Endowed with an infinite stream of choices, what happens in our story if we reach for more?
Download for free at: iBooks, Kobo & most Amazon stores
If you don’t use a tablet or e-reader and would like a copy, please contact me for the PDF version.