Time Bending

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A luna moth emerges

from its rough, camouflaged cocoon

pale green grace, soft night angel

spiral tails, feathered feelers

No mouth.

No

Mouth.

Her cycle: mate, lay eggs, and die

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Damsel flies, shiny blue, scaly

slim window wings

skim a handful of weeks

Gypsy moths cycle through a year

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Boulders birth in earth upheavals

Jagged or rounded by weather

Dense consciousness, witness

to passing millennia

one exhale in one thousand years

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We unshelled humans

spin in between

the slow life of stones

and 24-hour mayflies

We bleed and we heal

scabs and scars mark

skins and hearts

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Our convoluted brains

seek the Presence behind

this strange mosaic of being

always becoming more

expanding to perceive Itself

in every wing, every breath

To Love What is Left

–Mary McCue

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Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.com

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The stranger who sleeps next to me

looks like an older version

of the man I married 20 years ago

but that person no longer resides in his body. 

Dementia steals him away every morning

when I shake his leg to rouse him

remove his watch and necklace of rudraksha beads.

He lies there like a sack of sand

not raising arm or head to help me.

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He’s a toddler going backward

not intending to provoke or obstruct

forgetting that the pants

go on before the shoes

while I seek a way to forgive

my spouts of anger, bouts of tears

His disease tethers me to home

like a dog on a line

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Bitter words, vinegar sour

dare not look back at years lost

dream of a better time

Then waken next to a stranger

with his face.

Drought

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

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the love river flows, then

sinks below ground

sludge, slime and mud remain,

mud, rocks, rotten leaves

crayfish or salamander corpse

in a trickle of silty murk

sharp shingle cracked

by ice and sun

*

step with steadfast care

do not abandon this place

hold heart-close the river’s fullness

beneath your feet

pray for the rain of grace