Wake Robin

Blood-red trillium,
      with your sumptuous variegated leaf patterns,
      arising in big colonies early, so early in spring
      amid dry leaves and old twigs,
Triple Goddess, you sprout from the dry earth
      innocently, as if it were every day
      ancient knowledge comes forth into our sight.
You lie barely visible at our feet,
      one of the old ones, short and well-adapted
      to the forest floor, a gnome
      with a new red cap.
But no pretty pink here, nor lacy white.
      You are of the blood of the Earth Mother herself,
      and even Her rich warm blood has beauty,
      and she will not hide this, our Mother.
      She bleeds, and Her blood is beautiful.
Wake Robin, wake us to know
      where e’er we walk, She feels and knows.
      We kiss the Earth, but She bruises, too,
      in bloodroot, in trillium, in fracking, in clearcut, in war.
Wake, Robin, don’t be a fool!
      Here is Life’s own rich display, ineffable,
      the upward thrust, the very orgasm of Spring.
She is here today, for you, for us,
      crowding upward for us here,
      but once only.

Annelinde Metzner
March 23, 2012
Flat Creek North Carolina

  

   

Morning at the Sanctuary

The first morning light seeps in the diamond windows at the Bali House.
All night, accompanying my dreams, the river roars,
punctuated with her bass tones, under the boulders,
guiding me in a language I don’t speak.
“Weee-hooo,” says the first morning bird,
and “Thump!”, a half-eaten apple falls on the deck.
All around, the exuberant vines intertwine
with the butternut and the rhododendron of the woods.
“Safe here!”, they all seem to say,
even the three butterflies who fasten themselves to my shoe.
At three AM the stars blanket the night sky,
reaching their fiery fingers into our dreams.
This morning I gaze into the misted woods,
letting the visions speak to my shadows,
letting go, letting it be exactly what it is.
Barefoot, I feel the cool stones and the dewy grass.
A day on Earth.
The sun streaking through the walls by my bed,
a whisper of thanks unbidden.

Annelinde Metzner
Mountain Light Sanctuary

Garden of the Divine Feminine

Medicine Wheel

Connect

The shaman elder in Greenland weeps and sings into his wind drum
as his Mother, the Big Ice, sacred site of millennia,
shrinks away to dwarf Her former self.

We sing, we cry for Her loss.

In Bangla Desh, rice farmers build their homes on stilts
to avoid the big floods, the rising salty brine
leaving the ancient nourishment of the rice fields
unfit to farm, cakes of salt where rich humus once was.

“We did not cause this!” cry the people, at the extremes of the world,
and at Her center.
But the cause is here, the origin right here,
a gigantic failure of imagination
causing nuclear reactors of eleven billion dollars each
to arise where we might be catching the wind,
where we could be reaching for the sun.

Fukushima’s lessons are set aside,
as if “it couldn’t happen here,”
forging on blindly in a way we know just doesn’t work.

The shaman elder in Greenland weeps and sings into his wind drum.
Here, right here, is where the beautiful world tilts toward meltdown,
here where our children too
will one day scratch the soil and weep,
where we’ve gone too far, where She turns her back and goes,
where this one precious Home shrugs us off like pests,
and turns Her face once again to the rich beauty
we have forgotten to see.

Annelinde Metzner
Fukushima Memorial
March 8, 2012

Listen to Annelinde in a reading of "Connect:"

     Click here to hear and see the elder Angaangaq sing with his wind drum, accepting the wisdom of Mother Ocean beside the brilliant ice of Greenland.

The Forgiveness of Snow

Three days of deep snow.
A pillowy meringue has met each branch,
has had a dance with the meadow grass,
has floated into each niche, soft and hard,
until today in the final sun
all is brilliant, brilliant.
Walking, there’s an insulated hush
so in the cove, each argument, each compliment,
each complaint and daily praise
is gone now, as if never been.
A forgiveness in this, the starting anew.
Each white pillow says, “I’m forgetting the car crash,”
“I’m forgetting the toppling of trees,”
"I’m forgetting the soldier’s fire, and the theft of a village’s water.”
Each six-faceted flake encapsulated
something of those horrors,
something of the looming offensiveness of this life.
“I contain your great grief,” calls the brilliant snow,
“and don’t I make a pearl?”
Over there by my fence-post is some mother’s wailing moan.
Over there in the white-trimmed fir tree
is the diesel exhaust of a thousand semi trucks.
This morning in the quiet, quiet,
I know what forgiveness is.


Annelinde Metzner 

Phoenix Cove       

February 13, 2006

Phoenix Cove in winter