Shannon Beck

Tell the Jackrabbit

Tell the jackrabbit how discreet she is

Foraging  in the morning and sheltering beneath the merciful red dirt

Tell her that you love the way the sleepygrass dances as it genuflects in the wind

And how the grass shards sit between your toes when you take off your shoes

Tell her the weather is hard on your skin and you hope you have lotion in your purse

I am sure she will listen to you

Tell the raven how much you wish to scour through the morning light, checking for signs of disturbance

Tell him how you admire how arrogant and undeterred he is, cackling at his own jokes and        harassing the hummingbirds

And tell him you’d like to invite him for dinner: hamburgers with ketchup and plan yellow mustard and home-canned pickles that aren’t quite cured

I am sure he will listen to your story

Tell the gecko how witty she is each time she slips by the trail

Tell her that she is as hospitable as your Granny and her cinnamon rolls

Tell her you’re glad she eats insects

And how you’ve been meaning to ask her to clean out your tent

Tell her how laundry has never been your forte’ and that cooking is over-rated

I am sure she will listen to your story

Tell the desert your woes and your joys,

your sins and your glorious victories

Tell how you ponder retirement and God

and thirst for your life to begin

Tell how you hate your lover and want her just the same – and that your loneliness runs deeper than the sea

The chalice of the earth is full; the table of the earth has room for even the crumbs swept under the table

There is blessing in the desert

But first, empty your pockets,

strip to just what covers you and waste an hour savoring the incense of the juniper

Then, let yourself cry

Cry the ocean back

And rise, and go on about your day

August 15, 2009

Where the Ocean Used to Be

copyright August 2009

The horizons in New Mexico are continents apart

From here 3 different weather systems are filling up the sky

The clouds are raking down with rain; lightning parts the sky

If  I stretch a little more, I swear I’d touch it if I tried

Chorus  -

The fossils show that years ago this was the ocean floor

Maybe if I push up hard, I can swim up to the shore

And sit upon that mesa bench and look out o’er the sea

Oh but now there is a desert where the ocean used to be.

It is a rusty-canyoned Pentecost - there is fire in the land

Artists try to capture it, but no one really can

From the canyons to the Turquoise trail to the loam of Chimayo

You may walk away from it, but inside you’ll never go.

Chorus  -

You could die here any time

The desert gives, and it will take away

Hold it up, like life, like love

The stars still remain

Advent’s Child

(a song taken from the poetry of Madeleine L’Engle and Lucy Shaw)

The old light fades to holy dusk, a blanket o’er the earth

Into this night of soul and flesh arrives the fiercest tenderness

A flood of light; the waters break; newborn and naked star

Sweet scent of womb and piercing cry, wherein heartbeats of true love lie

The birth of wonder, breath on breath

The Cosmos unwinds into flesh.

For the ever-longing heart comes hope and light distilled

And every birth before or since bears holy heart and will

Into a world of wars and woes, so, too we come each year

Wondr’ing, wearied, clinging to a hope beyond our fears

We do not wage as warriors will –

The pangs of peace are birthing still

Strange we come, advent’s child

Born anew, Born anew

Oh come, oh come, oh come Emmanuel…

A song to remember my mother’s death:

Dancing Bones

copyright 2006

If I could I’d bring you lilacs from my yard

White and purple, dizzying like love sitting in this old Kerr jar

I would set them on your dinner table – walk away if I was able

There are so many ways to love

Holy stones and dancing bones are all that’s left to give

One needs to let you go and the other make you live

But I am made of flesh and fear just like all the others here

I will peel back the covers; hope there is something left here to discover

Time is all we have but we cannot control it

Much as try, if we are truthful, we know it

I filled mine up with fantasies gave them to you for free

Until what was left of you came tumbling down.

You were a shelter when the storms were blowing

You were a wildfire burning out of control with my knowing, with my knowing

It seems that I have carved out for you a holy space

I didn’t even know I’d carved it out until it was far too late

From this distance I cannot pray away this change

I hope across these many miles you sense in some small way

That Holy stones and dancing bones is all that’s left to give

One wants to let you go and the other make you live

But I am made of flesh and fear - just as all the others here

I will turn back the covers and see what’s left here to discover.

————————————————–

The Monastery Tree

February 2006

How old are you,

you growing moss and lichen, sage-scaled fingers

and hair

where blossoms used to be?

Last year’s leaf shells are disheveled cocoons

Brown and brittle, I think they would crush in my hands if I held them

But look

even so

at the crown of your head are many little mouths

opening to the sun,

drawing all the way down through what appears dying,

down through limbs with mating moss to toes digging up a cool drink of musky earth.

You are alive –

not simple garden structure for the winter

I see blue against your crunchy brown

Can you receive my adoration?

Although we never touch?

How many black-capped chickadees have you sheltered?

How many spiders have made their homes in your folds

How many children have you sent off to college?

100,000? a million?

And how hard did you labor in your growing, fighting cold and drought – showing off in spring and summer?

I want to love you in your golden years with wrinkled bark and ingrown roots – balding here and there,

growing hair in funny places

I am more sure than ever

when I think of all you’ve weathered,

that there is a place for me

February 2006