Desert Fire Sermon

I
The flash flood of suffering
is companion to the compassion
of the rain

after which everything blooms.

II
The sighing of the night
contains points of laughter
numerous as stars.

III
There is a way to pass
amidst cactus as if life
need not defend
itself from you.

IV
The breath of the person
for this moment
inhabiting your body
climbs the stair of time
no differently from the breath
of the lizard sunning
herself on stone.

V
Wandering alone in the desert
brings you to a door
to open on yourself
where emptiness takes you
in her arms

as the plainsong of sand
drains the landscape
of everything but light.

Each of us must someday dare the soil

Bees with their careful mouths
will someday carry on
the story of honey
without us and my arms
that hold you now
will be covered over
with chance grass—

even as we enlist the whole
flowering meadow of the moment
to draw us together.

My skin can only keep
seasonal promises to you—
the territory of our touch
is decaying from years to hours
to minutes even as we speak.

Perhaps I cannot expect us
to recognize one another
after we sink below
the roots.

But our hands in the soil
sift through the intimate
language of transformation—
recall the necessity
of surrender and dissolution

in all earthly love.

The Moss Knows These Things

How to survive drought
by hanging on.

How to steal away the
footsteps of those
who would walk on you—
absorbing them into
the finality of silence.

How to wield smallness
to crack a stone—lying down
with kin until there is
a whole mountain
in your arms.

How to translate the language
of spirit disguised as the wind,
disguised as a tiny circle
of wild violets—

Disguised
as tomorrow’s rain.

For me, poetry is shaman’s work: opening the door to the mysterious other worlds that sustain and give dimension to ordinary reality, locating bits of soul that might otherwise be lost and singing them back home, bandaging wounds by means of compassionate attention as our dreams remember us and we make allies of language.

Madronna’s practice is an earth-centered shamanistic one, with the spiritual goal of attending to natural and ancestral voices as sources of wisdom and healing in the service of developing compassion for other earthly lives and ourselves.

Madronna sees poetry as a means to access and expose the deep meaning of our lives and the living world around us. She is a folklorist and storyteller who has had the good fortune to work with and teach earth-centered traditions for several decades.

Recently she has collaborated with painter David Wolfersberger in creating a series of poems in response to watercolors he painted on his 3500 mile solo bicycle tour of the West Coast. Poetry/painting duets from this series have appeared in Cold Mountain Review, About Place, The Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Exposition Review, District Lit and elsewhere, including the Fall 2108 issue of Leaping Clear. Her solo poetry has appeared in the anthology, Dona Nobis Pacem, as well as in The Christian Science Monitor, Equinox, Windfall, The Clackamas Literary Review, and elsewhere. A half dozen of her essays have appeared in Parabola, and the community production of her play, The Descent of Inanna, was the subject of a documentary aired on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

More on Madronna Holden’s work can be found on our Links page.