We descended / Around the orange-lichened ledges / To the rocks above where, / If the seals are there, they are going to be,

::::::::

When we got to Pulpit Rock yesterday

Following our diminishing path,

We passed some young women

And my son said he didn't like their smell.

I, who did not smell them, asked the obvious:

What did they smell like?

They smell like dryer sheets.

And I wondered, in passing,

How could I have missed that?

With grass sweeping our ankles

We descended

Around the orange-lichened ledges

To the rocks above where,

If the seals are there, they are going to be,

Instead of composing myself on a familiar rock

I decided to keep climbing down as far as I could

To where there is a drop off.

First there were no seals

And then there were.

With their large shiny heads watching

I took out my harmonica and played for them

A little Irish jig that I made up on the spot

Because the majority of seals

Are of Irish descent.

(Article changed on Jun 22, 2025 at 8:35 PM EDT)

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.