Writers
Posts tagged healing
Poem: Getting Out
0September 9, 2013 * Dominique Larntz
I find myself getting out of the way
for folks a lot now.
I put my fingers on a door knob
and there is a pulse that pushes
like piano wires through my arm
to let me know there’s someone
one the other side.
I turn my wrist to release the tension
and there is a burden like books
falling from a bookshelf as I begin
to know the heaviness of being
the opener.
I pull the door forward shifting myself back
and there is another person precisely
timed to walk through, arms full,
unable to carry their packages
and open the door.
I watch the parallax of their passing
and there is space for it like planets
that have plenty of room to play
amidst the outer stars.
It appears almost nothing is empty
except my need.
Poem: Be Quiet
0November 8, 2012 * Dominique Larntz
Be Quiet
Be with me without thinking
through what I should do.
Be quiet about your
superior view.
From your judgments,
icy stalactites and stalagmites arise
where moments ago
breath and water flowed.
I am surrounded by a society of judges
that turn conversations into caves
instead of skies.
People judge because they are
only one step removed
from the subject of their sentences.
Would it be too close
to say you are afraid to look
as vulnerable as I appear?
Be still, create space—
for as ugly as you think I am,
you with your unkind eyebrows
and the knots in your fists,
my heart is filled with love for you
as weak as you perceive that to be
it connects with you like nature
eventually overturns destruction
when you judge her irrelevant.
Poem: Dare
0Dominique Larntz * October 16, 2012
Dare
Knots surround me
and knots and fibers surround
these tears that somehow
reincarnated all over my face and
my wire form from this week’s
vessels class when I turned on
Native America Calling
and heard they wanted to celebrate
especially by hearing IAIA’s
funny stories.
I thought, maybe if I had more
indigenous blood I would
deserve to be an artist.
Maybe if I could draw like
Donita Grimm could sketch
those Palominos in the 5th grade
or maybe I would deserve to be
an artist if I had not colored
those shoes so black so black
and then colored over the lines
in the 3rd grade—like I was
trying to make a foundation
where I had nothing but wind.
When my eyes clear and the tears
steer into their own infinity,
age’s newest warrior whispers
from within wisdom’s hood
words that weave family
into every orphan’s knots.
She licks my heart with a wolf’s tongue
to tell me to howl my poems
for the moon to hear,
and when that queen moon
gives rise to tides,
oceans will respond.
She runs with me
around the basket
I form in spirals
like she is traveling
across a midnight mesa
with nocturnal eyes
that declare me an artist, finally,
a poet at twilight.
Poem: The Eternal Red Light
0Dominique Larntz * August 10, 2012
Driving,
(how do I find myself here again?)
I saw the spirit of the bird rise above the blacktop
as its body took another tire pattern like paper welcoming ink
while I watched cross traffic pour over its broken form.
This form,
softer than pavement,
and the things we forge into smooth surfaces
(its final chirp whispered into the eternity of that red light)
is the death that brings
the fortunes of civilizations to tears
because
no matter how we pave our roads,
if we drive over our birds,
blind our songs,
stifle our softness,
lay tire tracks to our heart’s coherence,
the paved roads lead away
from our true nature.
Poem: Dharma Antidote
0Dominique Larntz * July 2, 2012
Her body cradles the sorrow
in a canyon so deep
you can’t hear a quarter drop
when you let it go over the edge.
She’s been saying it’s fine
for you spin words of delusion
that swaddle her up to her throat
like a spider’s web.
Her body can’t heal any more
unless she follows the path
of rest and peace and joy,
taking every nap she desires.
Her nerves need a bath of love
and the culture is a river polluted
by overstimulation, by addicts
rushing to destruction.
Her cells weep in blood, the only
language they have, calling for life
to be lived, enjoyed, cherished,
preserved, flowed, balanced, loved.
Poem: The Witness
0Dominique Larntz * June 17, 2012
The Witness
After this time of feeling
bruised by judgments,
it is enough that the woman
on the front porch of Kellers Farm Store
slouching on the plastic chair,
muttering into her cell phone,
maybe talking to her dad
on this father’s day morning,
paying no attention to me,
saw me return the cart
on my frail hip,
in my complete way,
pushing it into the others
as if I had never used it—
instead of leave it as a guidepost
to the ghost of my car.
It’s enough that she saw–
and not my husband
or mother or step-kids
and especially not
my unknown father
whom I’ll never shop for
and who will never know
if I have character or integrity or
if I do any small thing
to make the world more
navigable for others.
Poem: Surprisingly, How Pain Left This Morning
0Dominique Larntz * June 7, 2012
I was walking down steep dirt in the desert
with the same hurt hip that visits daily
in my forties, and each next step became
the uncertain place that pain makes
its bed frame since the accident.
For a few steps, I relied exclusively on the right,
placing my left only momentarily where I knew
its sole would not slide amongst altitude’s tiny granules,
and landed gracelessly with several hard gaits on its companion.
There’s a shooting pain in this sort of imbalance
that no poem can soothe, because it is outside the words
and inside the music of movement in the space
surrounding what I call myself and my body.
I stopped moving halfway down that hill
and I started to meditate instead of hike.
I took my eyes from the bottom of the crest
and focused on the rock right in front of me.
I changed my mind’s calculation
from counting the steps to get to my car
to noticing that I am in this step.
I told my left hip, I am here for you now.
I sustained a simple, humble change
of awareness in each step,
and the pain dissolved quickly
in an unexpected surprise.
Surprise because I was just
trying to finish the walk without falling down
and I had no eyes for easy steps
where each side supported the other.
Wherever else uncertain,
I am sure to take this walk again,
and I may not always find such easy relief,
but I can dig my heel firmly into faith
in the restoration of balance
over an uneasy terrain.
(With kudos to Thich Nhat Hanh For his Walking Meditation which inspired my walking meditation today.)
Poem: Higher Mother
0Dominique Larntz * May 9, 2012
Higher Mother
There’s no one to blame
but my stress started in the womb.
I have only begun to mother myself
and I am amazed at how much more
nurturing I still need to receive
from the wiser parts of my life.
The rush of scheduled achievements
has been a distraction—a stoppage—
from true growth.
Poem: Crater Lake
0Dominique Larntz * April 29, 2012
Crater Lake
Crater Lake Blue could be bottled
and then I could hold onto stillness with them—
my grandfather and my uncle.
When I talk to my grandfather now
through the gauze of Alzheimer’s,
I am no longer asking him if the travel
trinket I am buying is too expensive.
When I talk to my uncle through
the twisted lips of drug arrests
we don’t mention when we see
each other once per decade,
I can only thank him for teaching
me how to drive stick-shift
in South Dakota parking lots
when I was sixteen.
My moment with them was at Crater Lake,
swirling my sweaty hair up into
a knot at the center of my skull
and I felt safe with them on the road north
through California for a few days
in the middle of a chaotic childhood
but I was probably bored
and I had no idea it was important
to the forty-two year old woman I would become
who needed to know that at the heart
of each fractured person—
of each person who falls beyond cliffs
from which they can no longer send us
words we can decipher—there is a deep crater
of being that is as alive as the earth.
We don’t have to communicate in language
to love our families; we can sit together or
if we can’t sit together we can use their
illness as an opportunity to ask for help
or to help others whose faces remind us of theirs—to
widen the very concept of family
until we learn that there will be no saving
ourselves or each other. There will only be
a deeper, an ever deepening, cratering, caring
that pools in our spirits for us to gaze into
when we need space.
Poem: Neighborhood
0Dominique Larntz * January 9 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Neighborhood
There is so much I can’t do today
that I am reminded
to think small
and then to think even
smaller.
I remember being eight years old
in elementary school.
The teacher polled us
on what we wanted to be
when we grew up.
I said I wanted to be president.
That stands as one of my brightest
negative moments
in socialization
as a child.
While I would have
voted for me,
it was obvious
even the teacher
was shocked
at such a desire
and would not
have cast a ballot
my way.
While my campaign
ended there,
I still find myself
returning to
the intersection
of the avenue-of-where-I-think-I-should-go
and the boulevard-of-the-way-I-was-made
thinking I can re-route the-avenue-
of-where-I-think-I-should-go
to be anything other than
a traffic circle
bringing me again
to the same,
gentle, right turn.
An exuberant day
can make any future appear possible
and it’s easy to forget that to manifest
a career takes twenty-to-forty years.
Life also brings days like today–you
can call it depression, low energy, tired.
And I wonder how I can be
of service in my life
and in the world on such a day,
when I feel I am no good
for doing anything.
And it takes me a long time–until 3 PM–to
even be able to formulate that question.
Almost before the question is finished,
life has offered three lousy drivers
in oversized vehicles.
Each encounter necessitated
that I slow down
in order to avoid collisions.
I cry a little because I realize those drivers
will never see that I saved their lives.
They will probably never know
the mistakes they made.
I am humbled by my small destiny
on my neighborhood roads today,
and the invisibility of it.
I look into the heart of my eyes
and I wonder how many times
in the future I will be able to see
the same humble moments in others.
I wonder how many times
I will be able to see the deftness
and joy that others have felt
as they have traversed this planet,
making the world a better place
in a thousand quiet, transparent acts.
I may be slow to see
and to appreciate
how much
the small
and the smaller still
delights the pathways
of our lives,
but my eyes are
in the neighborhood.