Purple Hazel Green

Original Poetry, Music, and Essays

inspired by the big questions and the stunning mysteries of All That Is

Tag: cosmic poetry

  • Fire and Ice

    Fire and Ice

    Audio of this poem read by the author with original soundtrack using Susan Alexjander‘s “Elements of Tone” – analog tones of the basic elements of life: H, He, O2, Ca, N, P, S, Si

    Fire and Ice

    How can space be so cold
    that a comet moving hundreds of thousands
    of miles per hour,
    has a tail of ice?
    And so hot
    that stars burn white
    for thousands of millions of years?

    Don’t.  I’m waiting for the sky to answer.

    Be patient if I forget my dreams.
    My reception is filled with static.
    It’s never quiet when I sleep.
    Never calm once I’m awake.
    I want to do all things in a sacred manner,
    but I’m on a tight schedule.

    Ghosts walk the streets, I’ve heard.
    I can’t see them.  I’m still blind with stories
    of what’s invisible.
    But I sing to them anyway,
    trying to coax open a portal
    they can climb through
    and go home.

    How can a world be so crowded
    and feel so desolate?
    I have always taken anonymity for granted.
    It startled me one day when
    someone heard me, sang back
    a tune they could only have heard me sing.
    I ran away, not knowing what to do
    with so much intimacy.
    Scared of mirrors.

    Someone told me the Ancestors
    are not encumbered by the prejudices
    they shouldered on their human journey.
    To them, I am Briget’s daughter,
    a healer, a poet, a tender of fire.
    Sometime before I got here
    I qualified for the position.

    Must we wait till death to see
    each other that way?
    The loud mouth on the bus is Jupiter.
    Take some of that with you
    and the meeting you thought you were late for
    won’t start on time. 

    Adversity cannot dwell amidst beauty.
    Adorn the altar of your Self with flowers,
    and it will leave
    to find a more hospitable environment.
    Stop taking everything so personally.
    Haven’t you noticed that every smile
    is bigger than the face making it?

    — Purple Hazel Green
    2007

  • Keeping Watch

    Keeping Watch

    When beauty lets loose in the wake of a sound
    and lifts her heels into turns –
    what emerges?

    I heard the wind
    and looked for trees.


    Smelled pine,
    looked for needles.


    Saw the dogs sniffing the ground,
    looked up

    saw a Great Horned Owl
    Felt pain


    remembering its mate died last Spring.
    Remembered Spring,


    took a breath of Summer,
    and gave reverence to the passing of Time.

    Am I doing enough?  Am I catching all the signs?
    Am I doing too much?  Am I being present?
    What is happening now?  What time is it?
    What is emerging?

    — 2011

  • In Flux

    In Flux

    There is no still point.
    Just when you think you are
    still
    you feel
    how everything
    is moving

    through the watery currents.
    Even the shore,
    fixed and solid,
    is slowly transformed
    by the waters.

    There is no still point—
    only miracles
    of movement everywhere—

    Those worn out palm fronds
    woven into grandmother’s basket
    once waved wildly
    in warm tropical storms.

    That car
    churns ancient liquid earth
    into speed, noise, atmosphere,

    One breath,
    a galaxy of molecules
    every three seconds.

    Pollen flying, uncles dying,
    that butterfly
    is a dead caterpillar.

    At the still point
    there is grace and violence—
    a fireworks display
    with no grand finale.

    Everything happening
    is grand,
    every unique moment
    final.

    — May 2000

  • Infinite Finiteness

    Infinite Finiteness

    or
    For the Sake of Argument I’ll say God

    I know something about God.
    So do you.  And now
    we know something neither of us knew
    until, and because, we met.
    One time, or many times, when we might have

            listened to each other

    tell the stories that wanted to be told
    in that particular moment.
    A transmission happened,
    though we would not have called it that.
    We might have been doing the dishes,
    our hands in the water,
    reading pages out loud to each other from our
    Books of What God Is.

    And what that old, old Redwood knows of God – the music
    that has been recorded of her long, slow dance
    in her Book of What God Is…
    If I lean into her body, sink in until we can

            listen to each other,

    surrender
    my story in exchange for
    what small portion of hers
    she may be able to impart
    to one so new –
    I may receive one page, perhaps, from her Book

    that I can then add to all that I know
    about God
    so far.
    And maybe one day, I open my book to that page –
    just out of the blue, or so it would seem,
    and that page begets a new page
    called a poem –
    conceived in a conjugal union of
    Past and Present –
    about a redwood tree
    and cycles of life,
    one of many that fill the Book of What God Is.

    Yes, if we could lean in and

            listen to each other

    like we can with a Tree,
    or the Wind, or the Ocean
    receive each page with love,
    knowing that we’re learning still more of what God is.

    We’re all reporters for the Book of What God is
    writing and reading
    ad infinitum
    “All the news without fear or favor.”

    So, let’s say that poem I write gets read,
    to a haphazard gathering of strangers and friends,

    and one, whom I may not even know,
    finds a thread in the poem
    which leads to some overgrown, tangled place
    in her heart. Somewhat dazed, she stares
    out a window
    she looks through every day,
    but only now
    sees
    that old Valley Oak, so stalwart and reaching

    out like the shelter of mothering arms. She goes outside, for she hears the tree
    calling her, knows
    that in this moment they can

             listen to each other.

    As she opens her Book to put in this page
    a hundred pages spill out,
    and flow past her eyes
    like a river. She weeps,
    tasting the tears in her Book of What God is –
    the pages she’d tucked away and forgotten.
    She weeps,
    and all of them sing themselves back to her.

    She weeps
    for things she didn’t know needed weeping.
    She writes a new page with
    her grief, in moans, and her praise
    in crazed laughter –
    the kind that only comes after the prisoner
    is set unexpectedly free.

    Those sounds heaving up from her heart
    write a crystalline code
    into each teardrop falling
    from her face to the earth.
    And the billions of organisms
    who live in the soil
    made moist by her tears
    receive this transmission – each of them
    has a new page for their Book of What God Is.
    And they tell their stories to countless others;
    the tree receives her story and theirs,
    multiple versions of this one multifaceted moment of God.

    The pages swell.

    Sparrows, ravens, hearing her cries
    write their pages.
    The evening sun, glancing over one shoulder,
    casts a moment
    that the Earth herself writes into the Book –
    a moment filled with infinite moments
    of beauty and surrender,
    pages within pages,
    stories within stories
    making One glorious infinite Story.

    God
    is reading and writing,
    reading and writing,
    reading and writing:
    I am that.
    I am that.
    I am that.
    I am.

     

    by Purple Hazel Green
    for Marleen, and everyone else
    September 6, 2015

  • Three Spirals

    Three Spirals

    I am the motion of the universe
    – curling through the dark
    and starry spirals of the night.
    While the Milky Way seems far above me,
    I am swimming in her fiery waves of light 

    I am the vitality of the sun
    –curling streams of light
    breathing, tasting, touching, seeing
    multi-colored grains.
    I say, “The sun is in my eyes.”

    I am love emitting love –
    unable to contain myself
    I am the pinpoint of creation
    on a journey into dreams.
    Curling up with my beloved,
    I say, “The moon is rising.”