Poems and Other Writings

This page is dedicated to "singing" the landscapes of our inner ecology and earth to life. Each month, together we'll explore a new poem or piece of writing. We'll see how language that focuses on the particulars of the outer wilderness, can return us to the truth of our inner wilderness.

Please feel free to ponder the questions elicited by the poem below. Memorize a stanza or two. Write a poem of your own. And, if you like, please email me with your own observations, poetry, and thoughts. I'd love to hear from you.

May 2008

Hawks

Surely, you too have longed for this --
to pour yourself out
on the rising circles of the air
to ride, unthinking,
on the flesh of emptiness.

Can you claim, in your civilized life,
that you have never leaned toward
the headlong dive, the snap of bones,
the chance to be so terrible,
so free from evil, beyond choice?

The air that they are riding
is the same breath as your own.
How could you not remember?
That same swift stillness binds
your cells in balance, rushes
through the pulsing circles of your blood.

Each breath proclaims it --
the flash of feathers, the chance to rest
on such a muscled quietness,
to be in that fierce presence,
wholly wind, wholly wild.

© Lynn Ungar

• On reading this poem, what about you feels wholly wind, wholly wild?
  
  
• Have you ever felt fierce in protection of something you love? What was it? And how did your fierceness show up? Take a while to write about the experience and see if something more is revealed to you.
  
  
• What can you claim, in your civilized life, to be leaning toward right now?
  
  

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