Earth Prayers
by Mary DeDanan

Waking Waking at four to see the huge full moon setting over the ocean. Calm milkiness washing everything, silvering the air, dancing on dark waves. Grace sharpened by grief: I must leave this land, these waters, this beauty alive with the passing night. Like all of human life, I think, returning to bed. I will dream again. I will be taken into the quiet. We are always leaving.

Moon set over little black Mountain © Photo by Paul H.

Dawn © Photo by Marcin Whitman

Home Dream: stumbling on the cliff's edge terrified of heights wary of land mines and scrambling dirt. I can't stall any longer. There's nothing but that first step into nothingness: the moment when life changes forever again. There is nothing but the gift of butterfly wings, golden, invisible to all but the Gods. The prayer of stepping off the cliffs into gentle air and flying home.

Waves Ocean, I come to you and lay the pieces of my heart like rose petals around your feet. Bless my humanness. My failed love. My aching softness, a shooting star set free. Funny how the heart remembers more than the brain could ever tell. Remembers kisses long past, the singing of trees, the colors of moonrise. There is no wave that does not come again, laying down its lacy foam, its cool caresses around my feet. I beg for your favor, Foam-Born Lady, Sweet Life-force, Chaos, Trickster -- bathe me. I beg for hope like a seed, like the first flowers of spring, that love will come again. That I may hear your song in my tired disbelief.

Waves of Fog © Photo by Mary DeDanan

Mend the Pot The mystery is how I have held together all these years, through the shatterings and sorrows, the learning of love. I've skirted so often the slip of despair -- and sometimes fallen through into weightlessness. The mystery is that I have thrown my heart new again and again, cycling back in an endless circle. My bits and shards held in wholeness, as though magnetized. The mystery is the healing, the process of brokenness mending because the heart wants to mend, its many edges meeting back, fitting into their real places. And these scars then a reminder, like the patched pieces of ancient pottery, that my shatterings are now part of my beauty. My heart breaks often, not fragile, but astonishingly strong.

Wine Jug, scanned image from The Techniques of Painted Attic Pottery by Joseph Veach Noble, 1965 by Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, New York

Also see poems by Bliss Washington Billings