Emma Lou Thayne

Kill the Poets

Bedouin Lullaby

Here at my breast, my dark-eyed child, 
Taste of your worth and sleep a while. 
Under the tent of the black goat’s wool 
Safe from the cold and the wind, be full. 

To the Bedouin Woman

Let me bring home your dark eyes 
and the secret of their holiness, 
your quick fingers and your fine 
pride in the black tent they weave. 

The Dancer and I

As I watch, astonished, 

what I hunger for 
is not what I know I 
cannot do

Old Woman Driving

She lives on a street of white haired men 
with time for hosing the cracks. 

She goes to funerals amid people 
whose names she cannot remember,

Hold

Gray day with a brown leaf refusing 
at the end of a wind to drop, 
why is the crabbed clinging 
so intricate a part of the dance? 

How Much for the Earth? A Suite of Poems: About Time for Considering

The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality, this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1] About Considering Consider is…

Meditations on the Heavens

On the night of 16 November 1985, Halley’s Comet was said to be visible just to the right of the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, in the eastern sky. That night, ten of us from the…

You Heal

One morning you wake 
and everything works 
and almost nothing hurts. 
After seven months of returning 

Things Happen

Things happen. Early in the world you travel into them. One day
You rise without prayer in a far camp and silently hurry away.
Having slept under stars and still breathing the greyed fire,
Who would take time to suppose this the middle of a lifetime?

Secrets under the Surface | Linda Sillitoe, Crazy for Living: Poems

Just under the surface of the obvious lie the secrets. Linda Sillitoe sees, hears, tastes them, feels where they lead, trusts them, takes us along. It is never a perilous journey. Rather, it resounds with…

The Greening

Pluck them out one by one 
Melancholy, dearth, unableness 
Squeeze out the poisons 
Scratch away the sting 

Awake to the Ineffable: Some Would Call It Kundalini

Out of sleep 
Levitation 
Stirrups of light 
Palms aglow 

To Sleep with the Ineffable: Inviting My Sweet Informants

Cheek to pillow I slide my scalp up 
away from my ear the way I lifted the mother of pearl stem on the
silver lid 
that closed and opened to disappear under itself 

Silver Footprints

Neither masculine nor feminine a powerful 
androgyny like wind surrounding shoulders
of a crowd, drawing in, along, persuasive as scent. 

On the Death by Cancer of Someone Too Young

for Jeffrey Montague 

Your wondering is over. 
A radiance has taken you. 
Now part of the council of all beings

Out of the Night: Childness

From my Mystic Life after near-death accident 

More than a state of being 
A new being 
Suffused in light

Night Thunder at the Cabin

In thunder at 2 a.m. 
I occupy all my lives 
my loves hovering holding 
rising with me to the wild night 

Grandma Comes for Me

Out of Sunday morning dark 
My grandma came for me. 

Stripped bare to dreaming I saw 
Her occupy the fat black leather rocker

Trajectory at the End of Winter

Back from a walk along the Big Wood River in early May 

I am the river alive with spring run-off 
one moment rushing to be where the calling calls, 
the next a pool reflecting or an eddy at play.

Emma’s Anguish

Joseph, Joseph, 
            How has the night persuaded you? 
What bed but this? 
What arms but mine? 

Joseph to Emma

Out of the night of holy election, 
Out of the silence, the eloquent silence 
Only believing whispers to me: 
Follow the guiding of soul-felt selection, 

Plenty: A Morning Poem at 75

You do not have to do it again 
any of it. Only if you care to. 

You do not have to hold onto being anyone, anywhere.
Enough is more than plenty.

The Handing

—for Beth Rich 

She was seventy-one, moving on. Her five-foot-two 
leukemia-lessened to eighty pounds, only 
her hands the same, large, fanned storehouse of comfort, her
vitaligo, the brown pattern of taking on 
the sun to map the journeys:

The Rose Jar

Musky as the cedar drawer 
in Grandmas’ standing metal trunk, 

a genie scent, improbable and 
distant as the sound of hooves on sand

Without Question

Did you ever start to think 
what happens to saliva while you sleep? 
Don’t. 

On a Morning After New Snow and a Winter of Healing Inside

Out there in the yard 
            winter drips silver 
            and bombardiers through branches its excesses 
                        of yesterday. White. 

The Woman of Christlike Love

Into her brownies she sifts sunshine 
into a day she irons the clear scent of giving. 

Aladdin’s Lamp, March 4, 2003: on the eve of first strike in Iraq

Out of a dream 
a fragrance overwhelms me: 
not saffron, not lavender 
but something in between: 

Where Can I Turn for Peace?

9/11. For seeming forever, a call for help. Since 2001 a blast of grief swallowed like debris from the heap of rubble and human remains on the streets of Manhattan, of the New York until…

The Rose Jar

Plenty: A Morning Poem at 75