Florence Dacey
Florence Dacey
The Waves
You notice the waves are never still.
The waves change just as your hands do, as needed, as a task arises. Today, in this world we have made,
all the waves must carry us, keep us from drowning in ourselves
even as they bring us back to ourselves, without illusions.
We’re going to scatter, we’re going to evaporate.
We’re going to not continue as we are, as we imagine we are.
Do you think waves imagine anything?
No, but they haven’t needed to
so far.
But now that we are killing water, perhaps they do?
Perhaps they have dreams of a world without us,
without nets and poison and calculator brains.
How much do you love the waves?
Would you say, it would be fine if they washed us all away, this moment?Would you drop everything to work to clean the waters?
But here is something we could actually do.
Lie down by the sea
or river or lake or stream
until the water in us
begins a small conversation
with the waves
who are waiting.
Listen to Florence read this poem.
Prairie Smoke
Everywhere, everywhere,
like the endless embrace
of young lovers,
the prairie smoke
let their drooping lavender buds
swell and spill clouds
threaded with amethyst
yet softer
than a child’s first hair.
From each root
the command is to dance.
Dance as you sit
and pretend you are still ten,
too beautiful and light
to stay on this earth,
yet wildly happy here
with your kind,
the ones who let their hair
be taken by wind,
who throw their arms
around each other,
around you,
the violet spun cloak of your life,
the fragile, brief riot of you.
Listen to Florence read this poem.
Origins
Always we have been
brought forth by the trees
to be strung between bedrock and sky,
shaped for music,
surrendered to birds,
marked, worshipped,
folded back
into the wry forest’s palm.
Always we are
for the climb, the strike,
the rot, the break of us,
permitting the breath
the ride earthward.
Our shames,
rings
the child traces.
Our stripped life,
home to every
lucid blessing.
When we understand
what the trees are.
After All of My Life
Such a symphony of wind in trees
and boom of waves, this morning after
thunder, rain. I want to climb
the unfurling birch tree and leap, without thinking.
I want to curl into the cobalt barrel
of the wave and release against these shores.
Such a talking to my face, the truth
of what it means to live here, die here
in each other’s company.
Make everything move, make
this old heart and mind shake
this morning after all of my life
I’ve moved through like a mole,
like a wild turkey lost on the highway.
This is the magic world I never meant to leave.
The lichen are my first sturdy friends and they are many.
Graceful sticks rest across delicate blue flowers
and the dried black flies flutter somehow gaily too, in the web.
My body is a simpler heaviness
on the fire of ancient rock.
My spirit trembles like hidden seeds.
And in the high torn cloud
a dark ring erases itself.