If you ever lose heart and the earth seems as distant as stars fading into the noise of your busy mind, know this. That a tiny island exists in the blue hands of the ocean. That a tree grows upright into the salted clouds. That two eagles love each other enough to spend their lives greeting the morning sun together. That two eaglets stand in their nest, gazing at the heavens. Looking down to the forever ground. They eat and sleep and flap their wings. And one day in July, one by one, they will jump into the air. They will know the difference between existing and what is beyond. They will hold onto nothing. The hurricane will come, courage catching their pinions on fire, as they mount the wind, climbing ladders into realms of the invisible.


--T.L. Stokes






Wednesday, September 7, 2011


Earth Imagining Her Life



A leaf of grass. Still. Green river
comes down over me from the village of trees.
Summer is the long body of the earth
under the sun her lover. He can't bear
to stay away. He hovers over her
pouring heat in a love song.

This year the time is short
and she wearies imagining her life
as somewhere else, young and
running on stars, burning around the edges,

forming herself into another place
where she gives birth with every breath.
She sets us all free as she cracks
and heaves. Her fires plume

the only reminder
of the bone of these ancient
and remaining days.





for our mother the earth

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