Florida Vacation

Florida panther

Flamingoes

I happen upon a horned owl,        
three feet from me, in a tree branch.
The sense of recognition comes, an unexpected thud in my heart.
“Hi,  brother!,” but more:
that only a hundred years past, maybe less,
this animal presence was familiar as my breath, my blood, my sight.
Florida in the cypress.
Mallards float by, an alligator, a kite, and you should know!
You have been immersed in this.
You’ve been overwhelmed.
A thousand pink flamingos on a grassy plain, running, rippling roses,  
feathers with the inner seashell’s luminous glow.
We have been healed by this!
You roamed the land.
Fifty pheasants rose from the brush in a heartbeat.
You surprised a huge buck deer
and he stared you down before turning tail.
An easy bargain, all this gone, all this family gone.
The bargains are everywhere around us.
One chain saw to split the air with its shattering hum,
fifty Florida panthers gone.
Step in your car.  Put your foot on the gas.
Another black bear rolls over, ready to compost.  No heirs.
Send another fax and soon...
With every step, the human heart strangles in silence,
in emptiness, in lifelong loneliness.
No contract was written or signed.       
We’ve only just agreed to this spurious bargain:
one buzzing box for you to plug into,
a thousand of the animal kin, gone, gone, gone.

Annelinde Metzner

Tallahassee, Florida

March 20, 1996

Great Horned Owl

Florida beach

Florida jungle

Lifting the Veil

This Sunday, this Mother’s Day,
at my dear Grandmother Mountain’s side,
She is enshrouded in fog and rain.
She shows me her veiled Self.
How grateful am I, how sure of Her being.
Her vastness there
is complete in my knowing,
an unseen force of pure energy,
strong and palpable.
Over the Sacred Mound, a white veil.
I stare, aware of Her power,
and She appears!  just briefly, just half,
by my precious son’s bones,
by the tree made of me.
Pan, dark and strong,
nods playfully among the rhododendrons.
At the lake, the white veil,
the delicate, steady patter of raindrops
on the lake’s surface and on my roof.
So this is how one lifts the veil!
This knowing, this many years of deeply relating,
these many stories:
the star magnolia magnificently drooping,
the hammock strung, the midnight swim,
the beaver dam,
the wild strawberries.
I know, I’m sure, I feel
I can lift the veil.

Annelinde Metzner
Grandmother Mountain
May 13, 2012

Flying is just learning by doing

Flying is just learning by doing.
Three ospreys (then more, then more!)
announce themselves with a raucous caw,
spread their wings wide,
and fly out over the mile-high expanse,
Thunder Hill.
Right over my head they come,
so I face into the sun,
and then the moon, a tiny crescent.
Raaaack!  they cry
to get my attention,
and I see, with the high mountain wind,
the slight shifts of tail feathers,
rudders in the wind,
the bend and curve as they rise higher and higher.
I remember, in those dreams,
you can fly higher and higher,
just go!  You have your wings,
the wind will take you, you can bend-
Flying is just learning by doing,
after the first great thrust into the air.

Annelinde Metzner

May 20, 2009

Flame Azalea

Flame Azalea

At the top of the long grade,
through the rhododendrons and flame azalea abloom in a bower,
I arrive at Grandmother’s side, yet once more.
“Depend on me,” She has been calling, from many miles away.
I step nearer. Tears fall.
Not another soul appears, here where crowds have been.
I circumambulate Her, dragons in the air,
Star magnolias blooming. I am here, I am here with Her.

At my little campsite, not a soul.
I fill my bottles with icy water and eat my lunch.
Not a soul but a big brown beetle in the bath.

I travel on to the church of the Lady,
Our Lady of the Hills, and am blessed with the talk of the gardener,
the magenta blooms of rhododendron so high,
encircling the bell tower, chiming on “One.”
Inside, quiet, lights and candles, and it’s Spring!
On the kneeling pads, at the pulpit,
lily-of-the-valley, iris, rhododendron, phlox.
Our Lady’s church blooming inside and out.
She gives me Her shy glance, holding the Child,
and She is saying, “from pain blooms love.”

And finally here, by my son’s bones
mockingbirds raucous with things to say twitter all around.
I leave Bridgid’s cross, an offering to the trees.
My toes revel in the sweetness of wild strawberries.
The cattle are out on the sacred mound, under the apple tree,
new calves scampering to be with their moms.
Sweet the sun burns the scent into my being.
The flame azalea, bent by winter’s fierce storms,
reaches out to me in all shades of opening.
“Keep growing, Annelinde!”, they call. “There is still more.”

Annelinde Metzner

Grandmother Mountain, May 2011

St. Mary's

Star Magnolia

Grandmother in the distance

Yemaya Knocks Me Down

She will bowl you over!
Leave too many salt tears,
and the Voodoo women say
She will pull you in
to join your salt with Hers forever.
But you can cry to Yemaya!
Whate’er your sadness, large or small,
She pounds the shores ever again
in rhythms as old as Earth,
waxing, waning, high tide, low tide,
Sister of the moons, pulling us in as She pulls on our blood,
the other salt sea we carry within.
Whate’er your sadness, She pounds our shores
as though our misery were just another tortilla.
She is huge, and warm, and She smiles very big,
and without knowing, we reach for Her.
The salt sea rises and falls with Her,
She rocks us in Her huge arms, wherever we are,
around the world She rocks us to sleep,
high tide, low tide, dreaming of the moon,
minnows in Her pockets.

Annelinde Metzner

June 24, 1995

Yemaya altar in Cuba

Offerings to Yemaya

When the Azaleas Bloom

When the Azaleas bloom,
don’t they grab you, reach deep 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

Annelinde and pink azalea at home

I save the world by loving Her

Cabin in Sandy Mush

I save the world by loving Her.
April in Sandy Mush, the new green apple leaves,
so soft, each flutters a different way at the slightest breeze;
the butterfly, fresh out of the cocoon,
careening downhill, already a crackerjack
at navigating with her iridescent wings;
the blackberry blossoms, full of themselves,
wide open to the hungry and meticulous bees.
The air is filled with buzzing things, delirious with the sun’s warmth.
Even a cloud floating high seems to smile with delight.
It is true, I know, someone crouches somewhere in a room,
cut off from the world,
fervently praying that the next gunshot, the knock at the door
does not come his way.
I know somewhere, a mother walks miles for a jug of water
diverted from her village to sluice the mines.
I know the world will end, or so they say.
But Gaia exhorts me, “Look at me!  Take notice!
For you I have perched these roses on their stems,
for you I bring the striped grasshopper  to set beside you,
and the wild turkey walks, stately, through the woods.
Are you listening yet?   For you, four wide-eyed deer
come to gaze at your body while you sleep.”
I cannot ignore her, I cannot turn away.
It is my job to love Her, and She is vast,
and long, and wide, and huge;
I save the world by loving Her, and in this way, She saves me.

Annelinde Metzner 

Hawkscry  April 13, 2012

Many thanks to William Stanhope for allowing me to write at Hawkscry.

Listen to Annelinde reading "I save the world by loving Her":

Sandy Mush farm in April

Dogwoods at Hawkscry

Let It

Not just once but many times She surrenders,
the Wisteria, lusciously sweet,
royally purple, palest lavender,
clusters like Concord grapes
drooping, sprouting wild everywhere.
Leaves so new and tender-green,
I can’t even feel them to the touch.
Huge, heavy scent,
like a sultry liaison on a hot afternoon,
or like three Grandmas in church,
or like a little girl’s Christmas perfume.
Surrender!  says She,
and again She gives forth so big,
trees and roofs are dwarfed by Her energy.
Let it just fall, fall down,
give up, She shows us!
And why do you hold on so tight?
Fall, let fall!  and as you do,
your beauty, your perfect wholeness
falls open for all to see.


Annelinde Metzner   

Meher Baba Center

April 2009

A Madonna for Martin Luther

Early, early, on a Charleston Thursday, springtime on Anson Street,
full of surprises as only old Charleston can be,
I come upon the farthest corner of St. Johannes Lutheran Church.
I blink my eyes.  She is here!
Lovingly set against the whitewashed wall,
blue-robed Mary with her tender heart
glows among the roses.
Lutheran Church, church of my family,
church of no feminine image of God,
where our forebear Luther expunged
even patient, loving Mary
from our spirits, from our liturgy, from our prayers,
where in my girlhood, though at Easter we all carried flowers,
no women were imaged divine in the Protestant Church.
And here She is!
In the church’s far corner,
She smiles radiant against the whitewashed wall.
Someone has set two bluebirds,
blue birds of happiness at Her divine feet,
and a broad bubbling fountain nearby
reminds us of Her joyous abundance,
spilling over through all our days.
Here She is!   Martin Luther, do you rejoice,
do tears of redemption spill from your eyes,
our Divine One in Her place again?
She is here!  She is here!

Annelinde Metzner
Charleston, South Carolina

Guadalupe at Phoebe Pember House

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

The Most Huge Yes

I must have been four years old, out for an armload of wildflowers
-daisies, mallow flowers, phlox.
Elsie and I sat on a rock  to rest in the shade of the gnarled apple tree.
“Oh World, I cannot hold thee close enough!” cried Elsie, my Tante,
and on and on, poems by memory,
astounding my young ears with the bigness, the width of life beyond my ken.
Dickinson, Heine, Goethe, Millay,
-all fair game to Elsie’s keen mind and deep delight.
What is the world? She answered for me,
just a hint of what was to come, what could be, beyond the now.
I gazed at her above me,
and walked home with her, my arms full of flowers,
my little hand in hers.
And now, many years have passed.
My Tante is ninety-seven, but still, poems sprout from her lips,
and she, with her searching mind, evokes them from me as well.
“Prithee, let no bird call!”
We happen into a field, wild with flowers,
daisies, phlox, a wild quilt of color.
Thrice we return, picking armloads of wildflowers,
holding, holding, ever loving this life, unwilling to let go.
This divine charge we accepted so long ago
just to love this, just to live this,
eyes wide as daisy petals, enveloped in earthly scents,
knee-deep in colors,
just this most huge Yes.

Annelinde Metzner

May 2011

Listen to Annelinde reading "The Most Huge Yes":

Tante Elsie at ninety-seven

Elsie’s garden

Drove up to Elsie’s garden, my head in the radio,
counting measures and checking forms.
I raise my eyes just to park and...
Jolted into Eden, an ecstasy of brilliant color, like a cold slap I’m awakened.
These Irises (the eyes?) are a queen’s purple, a ransom of gold,
fringed, bearded, double ruffled about their delicate mouths,
waiting lush as Sheba.
Lemon yellow bearded coral, glacier white fringed,
with a calligraphy of magenta.
Rust-red and egg-yolk yellow.
I gain my breath, and big tears, here at Elsie’s garden.
Tante, at ninety-two, fosters this ecstasy of color,
and scent of peony, double, triple, magenta, snow!
Knowing I must go knock and enter at the door,
I breathe deep, remembering, remembering the grace of my DNA,
the colors, the purple, saying “This is me,”
coming off the highway.  “This is also me”, my old Tante in her garden,
pulling a true miracle of flowers from the unsuspecting soil,
back in the dirt where we belong,
this is me, I weep, I love, I remember, I belong.



Annelinde Metzner
April 2006

Looking Toward Tibet

Samdo Kunga, Tibetan mother and daughter, photo by Phil Borges

Mindfulness brings compassion.
Looking out across the plains at seventeen thousand feet,
white clouds turning, turning into Tara, into Milarepa,
here on the plains where your people have crossed the icy turf
again and again throughout the ages,
welcomed with tea and kindness at every neighbor’s tent,
how do you bear to see trucks rolling in, laden with asphalt?
When you are four years old,
and you journey for days with Mother
to see a wonder, a sacred dance
on the monastery grounds,
monks in brilliant colors dazzling your young eyes,
music beyond imagination, the cymbals, the horns,
how could you ever live in a cement block house,
bored, tired, hungry and lost,
forgetful of all the nomad you ever were?
When one has arisen at dawn with the sound of the wind,
a thousand years of holy incarnations spinning madly in the cloud shadows,
mottling the faces of the high mountains nearby,
and you bundle up and say a prayer, giving thanks for all this,
your past, your people, your medicine, your sacredness,
how can there ever, ever come a machine to quarry the mountain down,
to beat the knowledge out of you, to herd you into silence?
Mindfulness brings compassion.
Tibet will never die.

Annelinde Metzner    

August 2008

See more of the Tibetan photography of Phil Borges here.

Experience a powerful Tibetan ceremony performed in Bodha Gaya, India.

Watch as Tibetan activists rappel off Arlington Bridge in Washington, DC, to hang a banner proclaiming, "Tibet Will Be Free" in February, 2012.

Southside Cemetery

Gravestones in Southside Cemetery

Here is a mottled chunk of rock, set upright.
Here is one a foot tall, miraculously erect
amid the ancient stones and helter-skelter mounds
of this hallowed place.
Who is buried here?
What dark-skinned family climbed the long, lamenting hill
into the woods
protected by Jesus, for just a moment left to themselves?
How did they steal an hour or two
for this hallowed day of farewell to the dead,
finding an unmolested path safe for their black skin?
One can hardly walk today, the ground is so jumbled,
where, one upon another, the generations
were welcomed upward to the holy realms.
Some came with enough for a name on a granite slab,
a date or an epitaph.
And who placed the ragged, natural stones,
proudly standing upright over centuries?
Here are those who came enslaved
and died servants still.
A farmer, a laborer, a maid,
beloved in the hearts of family and friends,
anonymous as these standing stones
in the unmoving world around, so hard, so cold.

Annelinde Metzner

March 2008

(Photos by Patty Levesque)

Click here to read about the work of China Galland in resurrecting "Love Cemetery" in Texas.   Watch the video exploring "our collective shadow."

Southside Cemetery in Asheville, NC

Dragon Mountain

Moving over the mountains,
          there are powers bright as dragons,
traveling, traveling, up and over.

The air is never still.
          The power flows.
We can only sense it.

Only a knowing, a sensing,
          a shining at the summit,
arching over us, unceasing.

The mountains are never still.
          Over her skin, the power is moving,
the dragon traveling, timeless, shining.

Annelinde Metzner

April 12, 2010

Sam's Knob near Black Balsam

Moon Child Moon

On the night of the Moon Child Moon,
a warm January light paints each grateful tree
and settles on the forest floor.
Gazing into the white-glazed night forest,
I must not breathe.
I pause to wait for the silvery Moon Child Moon
to paint me, too,  with loving light.
I’ve nowhere to go.
I wear winter’s soft gown.
I will stop and root into the ground, 
silent as the next long tree,
waiting, wondering, patient.

Annelinde Metzner

January 4, 1996

Being With What Is

I worried for months.
I couldn’t sleep.
I trusted no one.
I lived in fear.
And here today, this green,
the last green of September against the deep blue,
I am here, just here,
being with all that is.
Looking up, I love the leaves of the hazel,
the sourwood already going bare.
In all my loving,
I often forget
how much they are loving me!
My bare feet crunch in the new-fallen crackle
of brownness,
the ash leaves dropping like happy kids,
crying “Watch me!  Watch me!”
The tree frogs clickety-clack,
the chickadees hanging upside down
on the sourwood branches.
And here today, the breeze on my neck,
the green breathtaking as ever,
I am just here,
my feet on the Earth,
just me,
being with what is.

Annelinde Metzner

Light Center Labyrinth

September 6, 2010

Listen to Annelinde in a reading of "Being With What Is":

Black Dome, This Slowness

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

The Vine Basket

I come for the wind.
At the high edge of Craggy Mountain I stand,
leaning in and rocking back as the wind rolls upward,
tender jewelweed and high nettles all around,
high ridges beyond and beyond.
Today on the mountain, looking west,
away from words and clash of minds,
away from the confounded jangle of yay or nay,
of human will forever at odds,
the wind rises miles and miles up the hollow.
I stand with no questions, with only my self.
I am four years old and someone is washing me.
There is nothing here but the wind,
and I stand naked as I’m able.
Faithfully She bathes me, Her touch firm and tender, 

thorough with years of practice,                                                                                                 until naught is left but the hum, the drone
of Mother God and Her vine basket,
leaning toward me
with Her absentminded lullaby.

Annelinde Metzner

February 4, 1990

"The Vine Basket" performed at "In the Mother Grove" 2009

    Listen to "The Vine Basket" read by Deb Scott and Becky Stone at the performance, "In the Mother Grove", 2009.   Dance by Helen Hollifield.

      You may purchase "In the Mother Grove" as a CD or DVD on the "Buy" page of this blog.   Thank you for supporting the work of Annelinde Metzner.

My vine basket