FootprintsintheWind.com

Your poetry is to refresh your spirit.

:- Doug.

Storyteller, dialogue! With your story, with characters inside and out!

:- Doug.

Poetry offers you a way to develop in nuanced tints and tones your lived value.

:- Doug.

What’s going on in a storm? A convention of clouds unburdening themselves of water? The earth calling forth electricity? A meeting of temperature forces so disparate they can only clank and clang?

:- Doug.

I am saying to see with new eyes, to look afresh, to climb above the fog and the clouds, however you might get there—climbing a tree, riding a train, sitting at your poetry desk—and see what new you can see. And to see what you can see new.

:- Doug.

Now I say Why but I mean Where—where do you look, what new do you see?

:- Doug.

I am seeing my way clear to teaching better. What? Not so much how but why, not so much why as direction, turning heads. Snapping heads. To seeing ourselves larger, as releasing multitudes. Walt Whitman contained multitudes; you release them. What could you make that mean? In your life? For good?

:- Doug.

There is work we need to undertake—difficult to-bleed-for work—like to help along the conversation about reparations, or to help along the conversation about life after our current divisions.

:- Doug.

What is the business of fog?
Of clouds? Of rocks?
Of me? Of my ancestoring?

:- Doug.

A way to test: Does it diminish us or grow us?

:- Doug.

Today God seems a thread
running through my head and heart
and yours and theirs and ones we
do not see long gone and yet to come
and who may not ever come
thin and easily stretched and broken
and able to retie, regrow, it may be

:- Doug.

What if your future were a break with your past?

:- Doug.

A child’s narrow perspective
an adult’s as wide as life has been
in greying years do we gain broader still
sensitivities for colors, fragrances, movements
of possibilities in living?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1984

Truth is at the edge
Of your candle’s light

Please pass it on.

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A poem has an advantage over a journal in that it is a making, a working crucible where you keep up the fire and the intensity till you have the thing almost right. Then it comes out looking like it could be shared, published even, if you allow.

:- Doug.

For people who may come along some day, what do you think of them? What if anything do you want them to think: of your thoughts; of what you started; of this age; for thinking’s sake; for humanity’s sake?

:- Doug.

Let’s take that train higher into the mountains, higher into the clear skies above the daily fog and see what we can see: Maybe not time but we know life passes. We see it in our clients as their health passes from them. We see it in our children’s youth passing before we notice.

:- Doug.

Your poem can be time machine
Your poem a voyager of mystery

:- Doug.

Older you are growing
elder you may be favored to become
but who would want to be ancestor?
Your name forgotten
one of so many substrata beneath
generations of bedrock
How many generations back
do you know their names?
Their deeds? Their stories?
But did some contribute to you more than others?
What can you?

:- Doug.

I want to get better with my poetry and writing, which is to say, to reach deep inside people of the generations and draw them out as wide as stars shine.

:- Doug.

I mark out a ringing with my eye
As wide as even wider can be
As deeper an abyss
As dearer a hug
As showering and falling into bed tonight

:- Doug.

I am ringing about profundity, bottoming, because I suspect there is no final bottom.

:- Doug.

I am circling around something akin to unfolding humanicity. I release multitudes, throngs, crowds.

:- Doug.