Author Archives: Jana H White

Hear me #2

March 24, 2013 By in Art, Poetry Tags: , , , , , 6 Comments

youthful abstraction

~

scraped rust from my tongue

older than before I was born for nothin

score the initiations of death

my gaming sport

rough and blunt points

for taken the hoes down

I’m not even tired yet

just getting started

gimme gimme

“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

To call out my anger. To give voice to all sides in this massive and long holding violence so I can see touch be whole at least in myself. I’m not asking for some peaceful distancing. Some mental balancing. Somewhere in there lies compassion…somewhere. I will find this flower

© J.H. White

Duet

March 22, 2013 By in Poetry Tags: , , , 10 Comments

mud pies~

Four years from the memory of water

I watch

as you bake cookies

Your pensive industry concentrated, I

 stand silenced

by the gray distances you favor.

~

In our own ways

we are both tempted by sweetness.

~

I have already learned to adapt

to the rhythms of living in the abstract.

Engagement

not being within the code

of your weather.

~

So when you are busy elsewhere

I look in the cupboard

to find

one cup of sugar

intending to make the earth

sweet.

~

dirt    sugar    water

seeming the perfect alchemy

baking all afternoon

on an old tin

in the white heat sun oven

off the porch

~

The flower swollen and car exhausted air

seduces me

I gasp in the embrace

~

When it is time

my cookies still

taste like dirt.

But I am less interested

in this wounded conjunction

than the fine film

of sweat

that covers me.

~~

“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

Making Mud Pies

One note

March 18, 2013 By in Poetry Tags: , 14 Comments

Georg Kolbe

~

I’m becoming

one note

can you hear it?

more hollow than a moan

can you feel my shoulders giving it shape?

~

no one else hears me

they cover the air with spittle and shine

foot walking around and around the center

no one dares touch

except with them as the star

of their own imaginations

~

It’s scary to think which way that goes

~

I’ve lost my skin nowadays

anyone can walk right in

pass right through and walk out the hole

in my heart

more flutter than beating

birds have strong but brittle bones

~

 I remember being that child

the one

more than one note

singing

Ceremony

March 16, 2013 By in Poetry Tags: , , , , , , 12 Comments

kimberly_australia1

~

Down on my knees crawling through the blanket flap cervix

 the intimate waves of heat are in transition but I am ready

even though I’m ignorant and forgetful of this raw intricate birthing

Sweat rides my body in rivulets a waterfall’s surrender

I’m tense, but with senses trusting,

I watch the cindering stones as they concentrate

~

 with love and arrogance

I circle the entrance to myself

and follow them in

~

The speed of the stones passage to dust

 unravels my retread knowing

as their elegant sacrifice eclipses the barriers of skin

 and feverish memories collide zig-zag

unable to escape my hollowed mind’s eye

~

I am everyone pouring through my clearing eyes of perceiving

long occluded by the fallout of the human conceit

where even nature forgets her balance

when time has a mind

~

Vapors are rising from holy herbs full of grace

  Still, the undead congregate here like moths to our pain

every one, I’m learning, has a place in line

and I am naked and grateful on my knees and finally present

almost touching heaven

in the wasteland.

~

“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

A little autobiographical note….While living intimately on 14 acres situated in the poorest county of NY State during the last decade of the past century, I had the opportunity to participate in monthly sweat lodge ceremonies.  The first was on a cold February Sunday…18 degrees outside. I began this relationship with the sweat lodge ceremony after hearing about a local man of Seneca lineage facilitating the sweats, who was being trained by a MicMac Elder from Canada.

During the course of this relationship, through my personal experiences of the sweat lodge and fasting with the Elder, I explored my own personal healing from trauma and our relationship with Divine Nature.  These sweats, and all I learned during this time, were only the beginning of this journey.

I’m grateful for the safety made possible and the care taken by the lodge keepers and most specially to Divinity  for answering my questions and challenging me to ask more.

Leave me be

March 13, 2013 By in Poetry 3 Comments

~

I never asked you to love me

it was simpler than that

~

to wake into dreaming

cross lines that aren’t there

feel gravity’s holding

move in your own way

that was all I asked

for you

~

love would have followed

the songlines of flesh

that exist and than smolder

without singular breath

until dormant

Resurrection

March 8, 2013 By in Poetry Tags: , , 6 Comments

~

Made captive by circumstance

in the garden of our sex

let there be a resurrection

of memory’s flesh held in stone,

the Earth herself embodying

the records of this undoing.

~

A longed for freedom

now pulses with a courage

transparent as a string of worn pearls

from the sea of this misguided betrayal

~

For we have always breathed as one

in any way our souls take breath

birthing a life

that blesses all

“””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

International Women’s Day

“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

The deep has always loved me

March 5, 2013 By in Poetry Tags: , , , , , 21 Comments

deep woods

~

The red tailed hawk still perfect but road killed the colors of fall

The drifting snow burying the uphill windows to lit transoms

The absolute quiet of white

 The starving deer the dogs ran down in that hardest of winters

The deer’s bones in the morgue of the freezer until I would bury the bones in Spring

The brush fires I tended that burned hot or low for days under late snow or Spring rain

The old ghost tricking me in dreams to remember our children born of plunder and rape

The gourds that looked like the swollen bellies of whales

The purge of the creek in spring run off stripping bark clean from tumbling dead trees

The surprise of the rising waters climbing my calves the ground saturated to jelly

The path we called Cat Butt turned into a river the sound wild and competing with returning brown geese

A lightening flash snaking the grounding wire silencing the music playing inside with a preacher’s thunder

The swath cut through the static of long berry brambles catching hold and refusing to let go

The oldest grapevine living with the elder pine protecting each other with their roots suckling water from the bog

The young maples I sang with as I learned their grove’s language

The low valley road no one wanted to travel that opened my throat to the sound of a vowel’s reaching

The last call and thumping cry shock wave of each tree falling as loggers clear cut nearby

The hummingbird sitting in stillness on the tip of the branchless dead tree each summer’s day at four

The oceans of colored mushrooms swelling the deep woods just that one wet season

The bed of lace and leaves tatted by oak’s tannin where I lay in surrender to soft rain

 The purple woman’s hands of black cohosh rising from wet soil dressed in the mysteries of Spring

                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Photo: Deep Woods by Nicholas_T  ( https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7296/8847022426_1d8de04c8c_b.jpg )

Light

March 4, 2013 By in Poetry Tags: , , , 7 Comments

shadowing all poets

looking for voice

Outdistancing condensations of time

Treading lightly upon soiled shores

Eroding titled consensus

Unifying mismatched ethos

Upending obscurity

Surprising bare feet

~

“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

danser_sa_vie

“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

Photo credit: http://www.unidivers.fr/centre-pompidou-danser-sa-vie-2311-204-2012/

opening wider

March 1, 2013 By in Poetry 5 Comments

to encompass the memory of lost ones

vital in images but

~ gone ~

 left to take breath

from air thick with the litter

of indifference,

resist making flesh from synthesis

~ holding ~

 balance in the

narrowing