Shelagh Meagher's Blog

Something is bubbling

just beneath the place where I can grab it

Some feeling

or revelation,

an inner secret taunting me with promise

 

I feel the soft bubble of it,

an insistent pressure

against the veil of my consciousness,

an idea pushing

to be birthed as words

 

But it’s taking its own sweet time -

reluctant, for some reason,

to reveal itself

I’ve been waiting all day

and this is the best I could do

The tide shoulders its way up river

against an opposing wind

Waves rise, spume-headed

as they rush in

like invading Valkyries, hair streaming

in their vengeful wake

 

My thoughts are like that today, too,

jostling against the previously peaceful flow

Bent on mischief, or worse,

their substance hard as water to grasp

or to repel

Apparently from nowhere

but formed far out in the vast, black ocean

where I do not like to swim

Yes is such a small word

deceptively soft but

filled with will and weight 

 

Resistance to it

the only thing between

doing and not doing

 

Yes brings unspoken will alive,

births thought into being,

desire into deed

 

Yes, whispered into the dark,

sends magic tendrils

snaking through veins

to quicken the very pulse of life

 

It’s not that it doesn’t hurt at all,

your situation,

how it pushes

against my desire to just let

whatever this is

flood in like the great, rushing tide

it wants to be

 

However –

yes.

So many kinds of silence

Good and bad

The silence of unhumaned nature

even softer in the night

calming and consoling

 

The silence between spent lovers

when no words need be spoken

for every tender thought to be heard

 

The blessed silence of my house

when loss of power

abruptly stops the ceaseless humming

 

Then, the cold silence of the dead beneath our feet

And the colder silence between lovers afraid

of what they need to speak

 

The silence of a room inhabited alone

The silence between awkward sentences

willing, in vain, a wordless understanding

 

So many silences.

 

Of all of them

Yours, my love,

Were the most beautiful

And the most devastating

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  When I was a kid and something crappy happened, my parents had a rule about it. They applied this rule to themselves too, so it was pretty fair. We were allowed to indulge in what they called an OOSP – an Orgy of Self Pity – in order to give sorrow or rage their […]

Some of you might remember my post from a couple of years ago Saw a Seal, Didn't Drown when I went in a kayak on the ocean for the first time, using the skirt thingy that traps you in the kayak and drowns you when you tip over. Or at least that was my life-long fear. I was […]

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