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My Mom

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Somebunny's been naughty

Marine Biology

Marine Biology

Nature is an indifferent mother, I say
dutiful at best, she does what is required,
but not with tenderness.

That is a lie, you insist—
many animals practice nurturance,
play, camaraderie of a sort,
faithfulness
and choral singing besides.
Whales write new songs for every season,
every task and journey.
This is what you taught me.

Alright then.

Well what else is there to do
in the deep but practice the chords of heaven
sweep open-mouthed
through great fortresses of herring,
rock to the gentle hula
of the sea, make love like two spaceships
docking, teach strange iceblue songs
to your little calf, tease ocean liners
as they sludge past your easy grace
with motors and trouble?


© Nancy A. Henry (1998)

Jonquils

© Nancy A. Henry

Jonquils

Oh you old broken jar 

you are like me, 

no use, no use

but Jesus

if You won’t mend

my shattered soul

let me spill light

from all these cracks

leak life to these dry acres,

be refilled 

from some unseen source

to pour and pour.

Let every gap be a door

into grace.

Let me remember

what blooms from seeming death

in the secret place,

faith multiplying underground

like jonquils

out of the light

under the feet of the disbelieving

who stand shivering

expecting forever

frozen ground.

© Nancy A. Henry (2000)

Happy Earth Day

Gaia
© Nancy A Henry (2011)

Orientation

Your first adjustment will be hardest;
the wild spinning.

Brightness is easier, though shocking—
and breathing air—

but this movement,
even in the container
that keeps you from exploding
back into light,

even with this pump
that exerts a constant argument
against gravity—

even then you’ll feel it,
the vertiginous swirl of all of it,
the surging,
rhythmic advance of sea;
the shrugs that heave mountains
out of shale plain.

Every one of us is overwhelmed by this at first.
Cry about it all you need to.

You will make your surefooted way in time,
a sailor on a rolling ship.
You will forget.

Can you trust me, stranger?
Listen:
one day you will attune to this mad dance.
One day, nothing will seem to move at all
but the rivers,
and the wind,
and your own wild heart
as you run.

© Nancy A. Henry (2001)

Gethsemane

Poem

Pilgrimage

This holy picture was painted with starpoints of light
shining from the body of Christ like knifeblades.
I am taken by the reverse image,

the darkness coming at him, shards of obsidian,
malevolent arrows. At Meteora

we tour a shot-up chapel, the eyes of the Blessed Mother
two crumbling bullet holes. Some soldier's
unknowingly eloquent sacrilege, this
Madonna of the twentieth century,

this Madonna of man's brutal blindness.
Yet, later, the bus crests a hill, and
I'm startled by a sunset so beautiful
I genuflect without thinking.

© 2001 Nancy A. Henry

Family Resemblance

I've been going through photos and realized for the first time that I looked, at 16, a lot like my Nana did back in the early 1900s when she was 16. I like that. I have her chin, mouth, and nose. I never knew. That's my mother on the right; it's pretty clear we share some genes.

Scene on the street