When the Azaleas Bloom

When the Azaleas bloom,
don’t they grab you,
reach into you,
say, “Slow down, stop here,
stay with me, look at me,
I’m the pinkest creature you’ve ever seen!
I am a flamboyant Madam in Paris perfume.
I am every little girl’s Easter dress.
I am big and fat as five frangipani leis around your neck.
I bedeck the temple altar of Aphrodite.
I am the petaled carpet strewn before Our Lady.
My pink stamens reach for you, trumpets of your awakening.
Each of my green leaves shouts ‘New!  Begin anew!’
In my deepest recesses are gorgeous patterns
of darker pink against light.
Fat bees are engorged on me.
My blossoms crowd onto my stems
like a thousand virgins of Artemis
laying holy wreaths in our paths.”
The pink azalea says, “Here we are, perfect and whole,
powerful, adaptive, ready for change,
offering beauty open as a thousand yonis.
Stop right here, and love me!”

Annelinde Metzner
April 14, 2011
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

Black Dome, This Slowness

Black Dome or "Mount Mitchell"

Join the natural world with your quietness and your slowness!
At this blessed pace, the wild raspberry
     can see you sitting nearby,
     slow as apples ripening.
At this blessed tempo,
     birds drift to the tops of trees,
     to gaze off miles and miles through the clouds.
In this sacred slowness,
    the bees take their time to choose
    this blossom, then that,
    then that one, and maybe the next.
This is how slowly the clouds creep,
     white and bulbous,
     all of us present here
     in the same breath,
     slow, inaudible, eternal.
I breathe, I fill my lungs with air.
This is all we have, all of us,
     from now until the end of the world.


Annelinde Metzner
August 6, 2010




"Black Dome" is the Cherokee name of Mount Mitchell, highest point in the East in the Black Mountain Range of the Blue Ridge Mountains where I live.