I edit my thoughts / The wind dies down / The news dies down

::::::::

After our conversation in the backyard
You leave
I go back to work but my body says stop
I stop and sit
I edit my thoughts
The wind dies down
The news dies down
The siren fades
Into the cityscape
Of the dream you shared
A leaf falls
From the tree I am sitting under
I have thought enough


In my work clothes I rest
I slip into myself
I lift my eyes to the sky
And realize that the sun has set
I catch sight of the crescent moon
And hear the first goose calling
I see them and stand
To try and count them
But stop
They are too many
Watching them disappear
I think
Of what I meant to tell you


...........................
This poem joins two others: "It was before", and "It was after" to complete the triplet. Writing "It was now" felt like translation. I had to feel my way back into the mood of the first two poems before I could finesse the language, or phrasing. I had to try to remember what it felt like to write the first two that were, respectively, about (moving through) the moments leading up to, and the immediate aftermath of, a conversation that just happened. Technically the three poems are about navigating the letdown of, perhaps, a last or final conversation of a friendship or relationship. But they are collectively about allowing oneself to be healed by the passage of the larger cycles of time: the passing migration of a large flock of geese, the setting of the sun, the phases of the moon.

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.