…

Escaping on the brook’s bank,

banking on nesting warm through

winter, but tears are horns that open

soft spaces, and autumn shifts heat and any hopes

for renewal. Love is fire –

from where it goes there are no shields to block

its scorching. Can we reach bottom in the rain?

Sing hosanna at the mountain’s base?

 

Becoming is the stone, the house, the wave.

The lines between us all are solid, no longer lines but

one heavy blanket of vibrancy, creaking, splitting.

 

I walk like I walk – barrel beatings,

borrowing crisp notions into my ears.

Stretched for a while to be compact again,

I hear an approaching intrusion, a high

wake, strong enough to travel on.

 

Stronger days of running through the weeded grass

where rabbits stand still at my passing

and insects move quickly into the shade.

Stranger days of watching a patio stone broken

from a storm – from a fallen tree that fell,

leaving me to find

meaning in such drastic weather.

 

Copyright © by Allison Grayhurst 2014

 

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry” Volume 4, Number 1, June Issue 2014

http://themuse.webs.com/June%202014/muse%20june%2014.pdf

http://themuse.webs.com/latestissues.htm

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You can listen to the poem below:

 

In response to the poem – Walkways:

“This is brilliant! Brilliant. Reminds me of when I first read Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. And I wanted to stand up on the city bus and exclaim aloud: “Listen to this!” A comprehensive capturing of human earthly experience in all its dimensions without missing a beat – beyond the conscious mind – dancing with the levels of our knowing and sensing – that we feel but do not always recognize, and rarely, oh so rarely articulate. Clearly, Grayhurst’s poetic journey has taken her to the mountain top,” Taylor Jane Green,  registered holistic talk therapist and author.

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