This is that quiet place

 

 

The woods call to me with Her silence.
That one stillest spot,
   all life waiting expectantly,
   brilliant April sunshine,
   wind holding Her breath.
I am drawn to that spot,
   stand rooted to the ground,
   head tilted to the sun.
This is that quiet place
   where sacredness opens up.
I breathe deeply, pulling energy up from the Earth,
   as, "eeh-oh-lay!," the first Wood Thrush
   welcomes me back with Her song. 

 

Annelinde Metzner

April 16, 2021

 

 

 

Wood Thrush

 

 

Sara La Kali

 

Sara in Her chapel

Sara la Kali                                                     

On May twenty-fourth, your feast day,
Romani people in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer
pilgrimage to be with You, 
dark Daughter, Sara la Kali.
Immersed in the mystery of the candle-lit chapel,
the people come and come and come,
men in black leather, long-haired women,
ordinary people moved by Your being.
Mournful, passionate with Your love,
a woman’s voice, low, sings with longing for You.
Sara la Kali, You arose here from the sea,
fresh from the womb of the Goddess and God,
carrier of the sang real, holy blood and grail.
They arrive in a hush to kiss Your cheek.
Layer upon layer they dress You in finery,
promises of blessings to all of us in need.
And then on this day, You come out into the world!
Men in black on fine white horses,
colorful flags held high in Your honor,
wade far out into the raging waters,
awaiting Your passage back to the sea.
Sara!   If we had known of You,
Sara, passion of the two great beings,
Sara, love child, Magdala and Yeshua,
where would we be today, our Kali,
our Kali of Europa, born to us all,
and in the white and rushing waters,
swept away.

Annelinde Metzner

June 14, 2012

Today is the feast day of Saint Sara, beloved by all Gypsies, especially in this place where Mary Magdalene was said to have come ashore after escaping from the Holy Land across the Mediterranean.  Feel how every year, the waters roil up when Sara la Kali is brought to the sea.  I view Sara as the daughter of Jesus and Mary.  Some say there is a long lineage there, the "Sang Real," the Sangraal, or to paraphrase, the Holy Grail.

Experience the Feast day of Saint Sara, May of 2008, here. 

Worshipping Sara by the sea

Pearson's Falls

 

 

Pearson's Falls, Saluda, NC

How did it feel, the discovery,
   before the stone steps carefully laid,
   before the thoughtfully placed and sturdy railings?
How was it that first day, the first human here,
   inching slowly through the thick undergrowth,
   following the sound (everywhere!) of falling waters,
   at long last to arrive and gaze upward,
   one's breath taken away by the height
   of the sheer rock face laced over with
   a wondrous curtain of water?
Time enough to ponder,
   to absorb, to just be,
   like the moth perched here on my writing-page,
   like the toad among the ephemeral woodland plants.
"Let it go!" She teaches me,
   as I sit and gaze.
"You will never know the whole story,
   what brought us to wherever we are now.
Let the relentless power,
   more precise, more intelligent, more patient than you,
   bring justice wherever it's needed."
I put my hands together, giving thanks,
   and sit with the trillium, the bloodroot,
   the wood thrush close by,
   breathing the water's unceasing wisdom.

Annelinde Metzner

Saluda, North Carolina

April 29,2021

 

Colt Creek

Forest ephemerals

 

Cascade on the way

Seeping stone

Mister Toad

The Nest

 

On her artfully woven nest, the size of a teacup,
     hidden in the labyrinthine branches of an azalea,
     the redbird mama broods her Spring clutch of eggs.
All day she sits so still,
     it took me a week to find
     her red beak among the flowers.
She sits on the nest, unmoving.
What is she seeing, her warm body so focused,
     so perfectly present, a servant of her own DNA?
All around, above and below,
     luminous coral-colored blossoms form her bower.
Blood-orange to almost-white petals,
     the new-green leaves bright with photosynthesis,
     the little redbird nests in a sea of swaying petals,
     her dwelling-space more glowing than the sun.
The bumblebees probe and float blossom to blossom around her,
     sonic guides to other realms,
     transporting us with their deep and all-embracing buzz.
New life will arrive soon beneath her downy belly,
     pecking its way through the shells.
 We all know, here and now,
     this is all that matters. 

Annelinde Metzner

April 28, 2021

I Have Sworn to Protect Her

 

"Healing" giclee by Autumn Skye Morrison

I have sworn to protect Her!           
Miracle blue-green jewel of all the worlds,
ancient blue mountains, vast golden deserts,
hummingbirds in the jewelweed,
black bear in the raspberries.
I speak for Her!
I howl for Her!        
I howl, “Beware!”
to you who remove Her sacred mountaintops
torturing her body to get at Her coal.
I howl, “Beware!”
to you who go deep within her mineral layers,
scraping away at her core
for your own gain.
But no one gains by this.  She feeds us all.
I have sworn to protect Her,           
this day that She needs us,
when even Her vast blue-green oceans, teeming with life,
are tainted with blood, the black oil of power and greed.
This is the day, this is the hour.
She, long-silent, awaits our voice.
The signs of Her anger are everywhere:
desert, flood, tornado, wildfire, earthquake, typhoon, tsunami.
I howl for Her!             
I love my Earth as my own body!
I have sworn to protect Her!

Annelinde Metzner
July 31, 2011



     I send out my poem once more as a prayer, to add to so many others, for divine wisdom to come through for all of us.   May we all protect our Earth, our beloved Home!!   May we love Her more and more each day!!

Delaware River, Margaretville, New York

  

Sacred mound, Blowing Rock, North Carolina

Redbud

 

Redbud flowers and bee, photo by Ruthie Rosauer

I can’t translate this!  I can’t write it!
It’s spring, my eyes dilate with an ongoing delight,
no end, no end!  Ah me!
Still in April bare grey trees remind me 
that this is no dream,
this everyday, this every new day-
The cherry blossoms, first to bloom,
then scattering in breeze, reminding of snow,
and now today, lush and greener by the hour,
intent on producing sweet red fruit.
Every day, every day, no end!
The hummer’s return, a long, long drink,
fitting for one returned from Guatemala!
Welcome, wee warrioress!  Battle on!
And then, ecoutez!  Welcome the wood thrush,
her deep multilayered melody guiding me back.
Welcome thrush!  Welcome me!
I can’t translate this, I can’t write it.
My eyes dilate, hummers buzz, 
and the chickadee not two feet from me,
cocking and cocking the wee head, 
seeming to want my finger for a perch.
A bluebird, shy as Spring’s first new,
and cardinals, and goldfinch!  A riot of color!
I can’t translate this, I can’t write it!
Along the banks of the river, red bud, 
misnamed in her purple gown,
paints filagrees in the forest canopy, 
here there and everywhere,
suspended in a perfect ballet, sucking my breath away.
The new dogwood, still clinging to green,
not yet ready for the full openness of total white.
I can’t translate, I can’t write.
Pale yellows and greens creep tenderly up the mountain,
a turkey buzzard gliding on the thermal winds.
A great peace relaxes me all along my spine,
up to my tippy-top, my eyes dilate, 
for the everyday of this, it won’t go away, 
tomorrow and tomorrow, hooray and hooray,
here’s my world come back again, 
this day, this day, 
this very day.

Annelinde Metzner
April 21, 2005

This poem and the above photo appear in "These Trees," a beautiful labor of love by Ruthie Rosauer, who photographed trees all over the United States. There are sections on bark, seeds, fruit and leaves, as well as the whole body of trees, and poems are scattered throughout.  Her work is available at www.ruthierosephotography.com

Dogwood blossoms

The Praise House

 

Praise House on St. Helena's Island, South Carolina

Blessed with a tour of the Gullah homeland,
St. Helena’s Island, where those enslaved
were given each ten acres upon emancipation,
we wander with Robert Middleton, our guide.
He names each place:
“This is Frogmore, this is Scott, this is Land’s End,”
as we pass from one wide-open community to another.
The Gullah people love color,
and the old frame houses, even the trailers,
are painted yellow, pink and blue.
“Everybody here is one family.”
Robert, on his ten acres,
gave a homeplace to each of his children.
“I can holler to ‘em from my front yard.”
Down a long oak-lined road we ride to its end,
where Robert says, “and here’s the Atlantic.”
People come to walk on the stony beach,
and swim when the tide goes out.
“They’d bring the slaves here in a boat,
and just unload ‘em,” he says.
All that grows here is African:
the okra, the tomatoes, the fruit.
When the white owners “skedaddled,” after the war,
land was left to those enslaved,
and freedom, the first in the nation.
At the Penn School, two white women came
to live up on a little dirt road,
and brought reading and writing, forbidden in enslavement,
for children so eager
they’d walk six miles to school in the rain.
“We teach the young people not to sell their land,” 
says Robert,
a legacy of Penn School’s wisdom.
Gazing into the deep, lush woods lining the roads, I ask,
“Did you ever heal with herbs here?”
“Used to,” says Robert, “we had all we needed.
Didn’t need no doctors.
Life-everlasting tea with lemon,
sassafras, pine gum, elderberry and garlic.
My grandma cured a snakebite with frog blood!
Just stuffed it right in there,
and bound it up good.”
The last stop on our tour,
the white clapboard Praise House,
the last one, preserved by the side of the road.
Every community had one.
“We’d go there to solve our problems,” says Robert,
“trouble with the young ‘uns, money disputes, conflicts.
We’d go to the Praise House so as not to call the law.”
I peer in the window of the tiny house,
a pulpit and four wooden pews.
“Robert, was there praise here too?”
“Sunday nights, Tuesdays and Thursdays,” he says,
when it was too far to walk to church.”

Step it, step it, step it down.  Remember me.
Step it, step it, step it down.  Remember me.
(a ring play of the Gullah children.)

Sing, shout, circle and step.
The praise house.

Annelinde Metzner

St. Helena's Island, South Carolina


    I met Robert Middleton at Penn Center on St. Helena's Island, South Carolina.  This is a place rich in history, where a school was created for local Gullah children, which was forbidden during slavery times.  It became a center of the Civil Rights movement and is now devoted to the history and culture of the island.  I am very honored that my chapbook, This Most Huge Yes, including this poem, is being offered at their bookstore. 
      I ended this poem with a song, in italics, which I learned as a music teacher, part of the musical legacy of the Sea Islands.

Robert Middleton, with Sue Ann Metzner

"Here's the Atlantic"

Live oak tree with Spanish moss

Penn Center

Southside Cemetery

 

 

Gravestones in Southside Cemetery, Kenilworth, Asheville NC

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. 

 

  

Southside Cemetery in Asheville, NC

What She Is

 

Grand Canyon 2003

 

We live in small spaces, working, eating, sleeping.

Do we know what She is, really?

How, in Arizona, She explodes up from the ground

into mile-high red rock, the Cathedral, the Hands,

or She implodes far down into Her own belly,

displaying Her inner self without secrets,

silent, awesome, vast, powerful, infinite?

Or how She riles Her cold Pacific, 
daily washing the Western shore,

turquoise and lapis, 
boulders thrown like pebbles hither and yon,

sea weed and sea lions rejoicing,

whales diving and blowing air as they pass year by year?

North, how She sets forth giant trees,

so wide and tall that each is a world,

each a life for a thousand species, 
Her silence immense and eternal?

And how Her blood, Water, 
crashes over rocks through Colorado,

worshiped by the Hopi, drop by drop,

measured enough to grow corn on the dry mesa

or wild enough to scrub the arroyos clean again?

Do we see how wide She is, how vastly new?

Do we gain that joy She intended for us,

privileged as we are to be Her guests?

Annelinde Metzner
Cross-country road trip

August, 2003 



 

Turquoise and lapis Pacific

The Cathedral, Sedona AZ

Tall trees, Northern CA

This 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.
Dickenson, 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
Wildacres, North Carolina May 2011

 

Elsie picking wildflowers

Run toward your creative life

 

Run toward your creative life with all your might
even when, and even because, tears stain the very surface,
the fiber of your creative being.

Isn’t this your truest self?
Isn’t this a pristine beach,
more wild than winter, more vast?

Doesn’t the joy breath of your inner life
smell fresher than new-washed cottons hung in the air?

When the long day finally ends,
and I come close to the inner self,
I pull back the veil.


Annelinde Metzner        
June 6, 2006

Coming Back Christmas

 

Christmas at Phoenix Cove

One must leave one’s mountains
one must descend early in the day
through ice and snow, fog banks,
ripped up trees and branches helter-skelter,
one must leave one’s silent warm cabin on Christmas
and descend through the trees
down the long grade in fog, way down.
One must leave one’s silent cabin full of fire, full of sadness,
silent, remembering,
on Christmas one must come to family,
come down through the trees 

while smoke curls up through the woods,
come down to help old Tante by her stove,
down to a place with children, with messes,
with pots and pans helter-skelter  in Tante’s kitchen,
where there will be singing and jigs playing,
“Ihr Kinderlein kommet” and the Crist-kindl,
chocolates in tree branches and sooty fingers,
the old stove that pops and moans,
family groaning around the table,
with resentments, accomplishments, aches and pains,
medicines and red wine and forgotten addresses,
all of us elbow-to-elbow, hunters and hairdressers,
poets and plumbers,
day-to-day survivors making do.
One must come in a hurry on Christmas,
come gladly to the loud rooms of one’s family,
full of judgments and kind advice,
full of wariness and unspoken joys.
One must remember to leave one’s quiet warm cabin 

full of sadness
and come down each Christmas, be pulled magnetic 

 to let one’s heart warm again unbidden,
with no plan, just you, and nothing else.

Annelinde Metzner
December 25, 2005
Phoenix Cove 

Star the Cat in the snow

My grief, my love for the world

 

Balinese dancer

I watch the dancer, one arm framing her face,
one hip drawing upward in the belly’s rhythm.
The dance of mature women, Raqs Sharqi,
born of the sensuous music of the Middle East.
Her hips pull us into infinity,
an inward-outward shout of beauty and desire.

In Cameroon, babies learn music
while strapped to Mama’s back.
Coming of age, boys leap high,
beaming with the village’s newfound respect.

In Bali, the gamelan orchestra cues the dancer
with clangs and thumps,
the bodies telling stories of monsters and gods,
each movement of eyes, and fingers, and feet
a perfectly timed posture of sacred geometry.

Oh humans, oh, humans, can’t you love all this?
Can’t you love the way we’ve created the world,
each culture born of each unique place,
and each of us expressing in our own way?
Doesn’t this beauty tear at your heart,
that everywhere we draw up our Earth’s strength
through our feet, through our hands,
and we thank Her with leaps and turns,
ecstatic to be stretching our bounds?

Oh people of our Earth, can’t you love all this?
The exquisite mudras of Bharat Natyam,
nuances of the courtship of Radha and Krishna, her love?
The kibbutz youth, leaping to dumbek and flute,
‘til joy bursts like fireworks from the chest?

Oh humans, oh infinite diversity,
aren’t you breathtaken, aren’t you amazed?
don’t you treasure each other, for the vastness
of what, together, we are?

Annelinde Metzner
Black Mountain
August 23, 2014

     Grateful that this poem will appear in the We'Moon Datebook for 2020, and I will feature it this Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley. 

  (Update-  this poem appears this week, December 14 to 18, 2020.)

Boys practice drumming in Cameroon

Dancers on an Israeli kibbutz

Raqs Farqi, belly dancer

Bharat Natyam dancer of India playing Krishna's flute

La Reina de America

 

Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, all photos by Sylvia Ponce

We honored our Great Mother,
Queen of the Americas,
filling the largest stadium in Charlotte with our joy.
There She was, emblazoned with gold and light,
Her joyous followers gathered in love.
The people danced, children and elders,
sturdy young men leaping and stamping,
bright colors flashing.  For Her!  For Her!
Quietly She gazed as group after group
paid homage to Her with their dances and their prayers.
The men sang, the musicians played.
Tears streamed down my face.
“This is my world,” my soul was whispering,
my roughed-up soul, who had seen such deceit,
my soul who had come face-to-face so recently
with disrespect, violence, viciousness and lies.
“This is my world,” She whispered to me,
pouring from my face in tears,
tears of recognition, relief, remembrance.
Empress of the Americas!
Flags of all colors, North, South and Central,
paraded the aisle with a flourish and a spin, for Her.
Children gazed in wonder, 
shiny black hair beribboned with color.
A man with Her image on his poncho, Juan Diego!
Ready for the North Carolina cold.
“Que Viva la Reina de America!” (Viva!)
“Que viva la Morenita Virgencita!” (Viva!)
Tears on my face, my soul leaping, 
the parade continued before Her,
teenagers with boxes full of roses,
young men leaping, feathers flying,
all for Her, and there She is smiling,
my soul weeping, all of us cheering,
a glad returning to this night for Her,
for all of us, for the beauty of the world,
for the healing,
La Reina de America.

Annelinde Metzner
Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
December 12, 2016

Aztec dancers

School children perform for Her

Carrying Her in a procession