Salmon Paths
Salmon Paths
Straying from the Fire a While.
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Straying from the Fire a While.

Bide you wells.

Hello. It’s been a while longer than usual I know, but I haven’t been at the desk dear reader. I’ve been out there, outside, without this technology, straying onto new paths. I am still out there, listening to seeds opening in the fires. I’ve come back now, briefly, to send this for the coming light and to give thanks for the blessing of your attention thus far. There is a lot brewing and to be shared in our coming time but, for now, here’s this and a farewell until the other side of it. Thank you for being here.

Praying for Peace Everywhere.

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Solstice

Only the tree barks remain, running the river down

to tap root, heaving on the lime streams. No leaf now,

to spread the falling cloud bar holly, ivy, yew

who keep on, catching at the ocean’s homing

toward these fires who glimmer out of stretched night

across the flecked skeletal of the returning oak king,

his twisted limbs holding Mars at bay, the bared swathe

of the hazel hedgerow, skirted, curling and burnt, in unrelenting

briar leaf and a yellow tang of willow spurs out of the woods edge.

There is this still, a no-time between, when the emptied wave

Sucks back to the ebb tiding, down and out of my spine,

Void of the sap’s rushing sap, a pulse, silent in these ears.

Yet the stream sound’s unhindered by the sated flesh

of summer, she rolls a pearly song around her stones

and rattles it up, into the bared crowns. I wait, then wait

to hear my neophyte’s lament to the passing of lamentation,

long gone like so much else in my machine deafness,

and its return discerned so very faintly in the distance,

like a recovery dream, seen via the glaucoma in my turned blind eye.

Cwtched close then, with the story and little else ‘cept

Clues as to an essence of a self and arms spread, holding

an always close, one dying hand, curling a tight fist around

some bewildered rosehip, a holly or yewberry, with poison

enough to guard Spring. Light, here is my beseeching,

your return, to keep my skin through another winterfold

and kindle in a heart gone out, beyond the selfing flows,

a return toward Spring’s risen mystery,

harmonies of mighty love, to travel with together, prevailed

to carry on, even through these darkened days.

Now, the solstice sun’s setting light pushes still, through

the mottle of a gull grey, inside of a bone skull sky,

carts joy and burgeons the oranges of a distant burn

tingling the grasses to a bright lime, for moments, firing

the hazel row to a russet edge and in the hemlock, landed

to the meadow, purple to lilac, brown to black like old crusts

of dried-up Summer blood, the end of the begin again,

the anticipation for our time-paths to cross, to pass

each day’s endless chances at the cusp

of dying to the candle dark.

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I’m off, back out to the fires now, back out there, straying.

Until next time. With Love from here.

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