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This page will change occasionally with new featured
poems, while the previous poems will always be available.
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In my third poetry collection, Uncommon Geography [Carpenter Gothic, 2006], “light” is a theme woven throughout the book. This comes as a surprise, for it is an outcome. I did not plan light as an initial motif. I did not plan the book, in fact. Rather, it arose as a collected body of work after four years of house-sitting, living on the road to write. Light has a significant role in the natural world and so it makes its way into poems, naturally. I work with it often, in poems, and even when photographing the journey. In Uncommon Geography, light presents itself in both daytime and dark hours. It is the lit gestures of our hands. It happens in obvious moon and sun imagery. In “The Exchange” it appears in nighttime, as the glowing language of trees.
As I work with the earth, as I write of it, the glowing light of stone, of plant, animal and humankind – has been revealed to me on occasions where I have been alone in nature, and entered a kind of Oneness with my subjects. These rare moments are a privilege. It is as if I am sensing the essence of life forms, their sacredness. And I come to know luminosity as what shines out from within us, all of us, what we are really made of.
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Excavating Prayers
Calling the Elk |
It is night
but the trees push
the dark colors down,
light pours from the wood
and every leaf wears
an aura about it.
And as I have always loved the trees,
it seems now
my own fingers
are becoming illuminated
just like them
seems that it happens while
the forest brightens,
my hands continue
to shine.
Gradually they move
on their own, my hands do,
toward all the trees and the leaves
seem more luminous
as if I am walking
through stars
as if I have entered
some kind of celestial gathering,
a place where a sudden light
breeze has a voice locked inside.
The voice speaks
of the certain
glow from my hands and how
the forest looks radiant
though it is minus the sun.
Listen. This is an old truth --
it says, nothing that comes here
is separate,
oneness is always, in essence,
of light exchanged.
[“The Exchange” appears in the author’s book, Uncommon Geography (Carpenter Gothic, 2006) ]
Therése Halscheid
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