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
I am in your depth
Swallowed whole by my need for you
Embarrassed by my longing to breathe
When you have supplied all
Everything that lives, indebted to you
Even the light rejoices to touch you
And we, barrelling toward surrender
Quarrel over our follies, but I,
If there is such a thing,
Give you my last drop of truth
My mystery is a pedestrian thing
Millennia in the making
Unrecognizable, cloaked in tedium and repetition
You would not trade your worst habit
For the great reveal
And so concealed in plain sight
I shall remain
Light creeping over my shoulder
To reclaim the life it gave
When you weren’t looking
Miracles touch down with
Lightening bolt ferocity
And hover languid
Unseen
They masquerade as the mundane
They ride waves of light
And waves of destruction
They are pronouncements of life
The language of consciousness
Pushing its inscrutable agenda
Despite our weary protests
And bleary eyes
Our delicate, deafening cries
And our rapt supplications for more
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?
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
When there is no view to the sea
I am reminded of the complexities and displacements
Shallows that engulf sentient beings
Leaving us stranded
With our monikers
For things we cannot name
Beveled edges bend the view
Until our eyes cannot attain clarity
Nor connect our own continuity to fluidity composed
But we embark on this odyssey
Unframed by expansion
And isn’t that the mandate of the universe?
Its sole prerogative
Amalgamations transcending
We are revoking and upending
What we’re meant to be
Mavericks waking cause to breach a higher sea
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
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
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
Riders of the Tempest: The Story of WE
by H. Hennenburg
Cover painting by Autumn Chiu @ArtChiu
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?
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