Green

Green shoots through branches, baking in sun.
I grasp green with my lips, my heart.
There’s a vine in here, wanting sun!
Green, tight with veins and stems,
fiery, fluid, reaching.
From my lips, a vine, and with it words.
I remember our kinship. We are one!
My mouth holds vines, brilliant tendrils.
If I’m still long enough, they will shoot out from me!
From my toes, roots, cool earth pulling them along.
From my fingers, tendrils
straining for sun. More brilliance!
A long July day of brilliance, heat,
a green burning, making nutriment,
chlorophyll, melanin, colors reaching,
reaching to paint life in air,
and then singing!
The green and red blood become singing,
the sun’s song, the cool brown earth’s song,
the burning red-green light of creation,
the healing song, green, burning.

Annelinde Metzner
Catskill Farm
July 13, 1995

 

Spicebush Swallowtail

So this is what it’s like to metamorphose:
your heavy self creeping, creeping,
slow and deliberate, day after day,
and then, (why?)
one day, just this day,
you spin a fine web to bind you, to hold you,
to surround you, to darken the sky,
to keep you within a warm space, silent, unmoving, unknowing.
How you love your chrysalis!
It holds you snug, suspended, not breathing, not quite being.
And then, (why?) one day, just this day,
you desire above all else to tear this cocoon asunder,
to rip it to shreds, to see the light,
to breathe, to open one tiny space
until you, Slug, heavy and slow,
have wings now, you are naught but wings!
Wings thinner than air itself, and with the slightest stir,
You fly.  You fly.  You fly.

Annelinde Metzner
Mountain Light Sanctuary
July 14, 2012

Just the Way Things Are

An early walk by the lake
high in the Blue Ridge, near Grandmother.
The veery, over and over,
spirals her mystical song down over us, a double helix.
The wood thrush, uppity-up, downy-down,
and the way its song breaks up at the end,
a lesson in impermanence.
The whip-poor-will too, as round and beautiful a tone,
a magic flute.
Across the lake in the early morning,
a cormorant flies low and straight
then stops to hang her big wings out to dry.
Slowly, slowly steps the doe,
carelessly chewing on elder flowers,
as though all of this were the everyday gift,
just the way things are.

Annelinde Metzner
Price Lake
June 22, 2012

Elder flower

Japanese Swell Shark

Swell shark embryo in egg sac

What a mother you have!
Fifty yards below the sea,
you grow from a whisper to a fish, in your smooth egg-sac,
anchored by cool chains your mother made you,
and wound around coral, that the sea might not steal you.
Red choral and yellow.
What a luminous home!
What a way to grow!
Lucky fish baby.

Annelinde Metzner

September 1, 1981

Columbia, South Carolina



Learn more about the amazing Japanese Swell Shark here.

Japanese Swell Shark

Embryo