I am you and you are me.
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
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Truth to Sea
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
© H. Hennenburg, 7 March 2021
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Dumbstruck
The questions die on my lips
There is nothing left but to wait
So odd a creature
Struck dumb
By all the space between
What can be known
And what is truly at the heart of the matter
© H. Hennenburg, 5 December 2020
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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
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Only One Is True
I cannot single-handedly dismantle this illusion we have built together
None of us can
We try to make it on our own
But of course
None of us is ever truly alone
Every time I lift my hand
It is your hand I’m lifting
Every time I see my god
It is your face I’m seeing
Every time I raise my voice
It is your name on the tip of my tongue
So why am I so fused with this notion of separation?
So confused by how the I AM
And the WE ARE
So seldom agree with one another
When only one is true
But until I embrace the me in you
We are stranded
© H. Hennenburg, 16 April 2019
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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
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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?
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?
© H. Hennenburg, 18 August 2019
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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.
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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.
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