This year, I was mourning and navigating the slow dissolution of a place I loved (including mourning the deaths of many animals) and then finding my way to my next step: launching a business. It was the fewest entries in the Sensorium in years, but there were still plenty of words for a gratitude poem -- and I am pleased to continue this tradition: writing a poem inspired by all of the things I have been grateful for in the past year for Thanksgiving. This, along with adopting a turkey from a sanctuary, is one of my favorite traditions.
Gratitude Poem 2024: Making Connections
How did it rise into the light? Into the branches?
A journey of salmon, eagles, and bears: We imagine.
Here is something, we knew: We are connected, deeply and at distance. Yet, our paths remain mysterious. Renewed wonder at source.
I remember: When Sam and I connected by love alone. Me on one end of the earth and he on the other, opposite ends of the equator. He, freezing.
I, sweltering: We tucked into each other’s souls.
On distant twisted paper paths, we wrote oceanic sestinas and danced capoeiera.
Mailing love, as if we knew: We would continue to play games for years, five waves at a time. Yet, everything remains uncertain. Unknowable, unfathomable oceans.
Now Sam, I, and the raccoons live with the cherry tree in our magical backyard. They nestle high in the branches making babies and we look up from the grass down below.
We live in a too-large-for-us house.
A tiny childhood house: A square, a triangle, and two circles in front, I imagined.
Sam, I, and the animals have all been in the backyard for ages; red, yellow, orange, brown, and green, leaves and branches, unfurling sun and shade. Seasonal, ever-changing love.
One day, Sam and I opened a new room in the house. We took everything outside and made an entirely new space inside appear. Like magic.
The dogs entered: Tails wagging.
The cat sprawled on the chaise lounge. The animals said, “We love our home.”
Everyone wanted to rest there: Sit and contemplate. Finding creativity born of boredom, before awaking into the logic of the next sparring week. A space of transcendent silence.
Reverend Sarah suggests Good Morning Habitat as a meditation: Paying attention to all of the beings in the world around you in the moment.
As always, around the block, I see squirrels and crows.
They make poetry as dogs make play, attending to neighborhood life.
It’s as if I were the author of the Dogs of Middlemarch. I have written all and nothing. Books come into and out of existence. What are the people reading?
Do the seals along the Everett waterfront who bask flat on sunned concrete know
that they will one day be part of the rainforests?
As they are part of them now: Rising in upturned branches.
I am pouring cream into my coffee: Calling my mother, to say “Happy Sunday.”
Yes, the people voting memorialize cats. They build floral altars for Lord Byron of Capitol Hill, mourning his transient paws. We are connected at source. Among the mysterious.
And all of the solid animals. I am grateful.
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