This is a poem that arose from grief post the August fire storms around our home, here in Northern California, and all fires storms, literal and metaphorical, around the world, where so much is being lost in these times. It honours the journey of grief as an initiation into the mysteries of the heart’s love.

Beneath distraction, anger, fear, dread, and paralysis of facing down the enormity of our times, lay the deeper river of grief that records our losses. Once felt and journey’d through, it’s possible for the clearer, warrior energy to rise that continues the fight for protection of a compassionate world that can offer fairness, justice, and safety to all.

May peace and wise action prevail at this time.

ghost meditation

There is a landscape
beneath the push, the pull
the taut face turned into a wall.

There is a distant sea
where the sail ship,
chartered by winds of loss,
carries your hurting soul…

Across
that buttoned down
defence of a hopeful future.

Here lives a musical box
of wailing hearts
waiting for your presence
to enter their memory hall.

Meet the ghosts…
lost to the fires of annihilation
the Covid dead roaming,
the psychotic war dogs unleashed.

They all wail at the empty feast
served in the valley of loss.

They surf the rip tide
where litanies
list the losses
echoing up from
lattice grids shut down
over the cargo of our long gone pieces.

While silent ash
of burnt forests
charred animals
birds dashed to earth,
billions of tiny workers of evolution
houses, cars, and life dreams …
Vanish

Algorithms march those confused
into the razor vortex
of truth is no more.

Fragments of countries,
families, friends,
swirl like ash storms
from fallen worlds
disintegrating our beleaguered minds.

The dark red sky at midday
announces,
‘you cannot live here anymore.’

We are now all queued refugees
from America’s strangeness.

In the gaping void
monsters rush in.

Float anyhow in your tear filled body.
Allow your aching chest,
gasping to hold
the karmic storehouse
of wounds,
to soften even more…

As you sail into shore
to meet the ancient siren
of ancestors grief,
your grief,
and all our grief
at this
nearing last station,
of our world’s end.

thanissara – sept 15^th, 2020

I share this profound and haunting musical study on grief, composed by Nick Cave honouring the loss of his 15 year old son due to accidental death.