a thank you for you — and your light — Thank you, dear readers Heaven’s manna, being heard You are Grace and Feast — dark Before now crystal caves echoing flames of Afters ©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021 I’ve been intrigued by the idea of a crystal cave ever since I read Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave when I was 14…

Take a walk with me… — “In the end, we’re all just walking each other home.” Ram Dass The above quote says it all for me. I could so easily make it my entire bio…Except I suspect Quy Ma expects a bit more out of me than this. (Insert smile emoji.)

With Walt (not Disney), my demons, and my large, liberated contradictory Self. A hybrid poem. (Like my self) — Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman from Song of Myself At last (at last) I have accepted I am an oyster – innards irritated, ganglia snarled and shorting, sick unto death of allowing myself to be served up half shelled for others to slather with horseradish and reduction-sauced…

Be ruthless — dig root deep — The deeper we go, the higher our frequencies. Nalini MacNab It is so tempting – weeding without right digging. Roots beneath untouched. Flowers given the all-clear, homesteading wildly. Beguiled. Serpentine weeds smile – slow, steady thrusts through Dark’s soil. Sun-dappled truth sighs. In Soul’s garden, do The Work. Third eye…

Not one but two poems prompted by a move and an ex-landlord who thrashed and trashed me financially — I. You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. Anne Lamott On hold — Muzak-ed classic rock tunes on interminable loop. The gentleman at Athens taking longer than I rented the property to verify…

An ode to two words I didn’t know — Roriferous: generating dew/Merriam-Webster Coruscate: to give off light in bright beams, to sparkle/Merriam-Webster Dawning on me — my need of a new way to tackle today. To manifest two definitions at once – like an ice cream sandwich’s luscious cocktail of chocolate and vanilla or a blank wall losing ground to time-lapse surround-bounds of Virginia creeper…

A hybrid poem on remembering how to fly — Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings. Jelaluddin Rumi, The Essential Rumi My sky asunder — each half of my heart jagged-edged as lightning. My middle earth, quaking in shock — earworms in waves. How could I? How…

My inner kitty leaps and pounces — These cats are thought to bring good luck. Iheartcats.com Am I a lucky duck? Look! Atop my patio’s pilaster — a calico cat perched — just as — like my living room lamp, courtesy of a tuxedo named Go, long gone — I toppled and crashed. My ticking as time tocks…