Exploring universal true.
Deed
Everything awakens
As the hours grow long
The air thick with song
My intolerance of windows closed
Against the sound
Recoils and rebounds in me
Until finally the wound must open
The hole in the wall afforded its dignity
Will you give to me the same?
© H. Hennenburg, 3 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
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
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2021 H. Hennenburg
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
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2021 H. Hennenburg
Revocation
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
© H. Hennenburg, 30 January 2021
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2021 H. Hennenburg
Miracles
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
© H. Hennenburg, 21 February 2020
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2020 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
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
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
