HOPEFUL GROUND
Written and performed by Deanna McKinstry-Edwards of Carmel, CA.
Hopeful Ground is written and performed by Deanna McKinstry-Edwards and uploaded to SoundCloud by Stephanie Pope April 24, 2017 ©2017 Hopeful Ground Deanna McKinstry-Edwards All Rights Retained
SONG LYRICS
I remember the
world
when I was a girl,
And it all spun
round
on hopeful ground.
I remember the way
The songs of that
day
Carried the sound
Of a higher
ground.
Chorus:
We are the girls
Who never stopped
believing.
Our voices should
be heard
For there are
dreams worth keeping.
We’ve crested
life’s fierce waves,
We’ve honored all
the graves
Of those who came
before us
Who even now
implore us
To live on hopeful
ground.
I remember the way
the light shaped
the day.
There were great
things to do,
whole worlds to
renew.
We took up the
call
Risked taking a
fall,
But it all made
sense,
We were now off the
fence.
POETRY
BIRD DOG For Asher
His mind moves
like a prophet
stalking
the beauty of food.
Every footstep a sacrifice,
a praise song of breath and motion,
a stamina born of tall grasses
and woodlands full of
ripe birds and the games of men.
Dreams soaked with hunger
pad his footfalls in promises.
He must not disappoint himself,
and his comrades.
The tall grasses have not forgotten him,
nor he their history
brushing against his fur,
hiding him as he moves
almost without moving, closer.
It is a foolish music
that can only win now and then,
but the now and then is the
music that drives his body.
And at night on the couch,
when he sleep with his legs
in the air like bent reeds,
I know I am seeing far, far
back into the friendship of fur
and human need
played out in olden times by firelight,
roasting the beatitudes of food
from the shared hunt.
©2017 Bird Dog Deanna McKinstry-Edwards mythopoetry.com
©2017 Bird Dog Deanna McKinstry-Edwards All Rights Retained
THE DEAD
The dead. Rarely are.
Even if you walk in moccasins
through a mossy wood,
and disturb not a leaf,
the dead will be disturbed.
They can’t help it.
Even if rivers make promises
to swallow their ashes,
and mountains chew their bones,
their voices seep through
the smallest spaces.
The dead always slip through,
courting the living.
Something about death,
however, cannot last forever.
Something about forever
is little understood.
©2017 The Dead Deanna McKinstry-Edwards mythopoetry.com
THE LAST LIGHT IN THE MOLES EYES
Dying on the blacktop
from the wheels
of a fast moving traveler
the little mole
has waited for me to pass by.
Our eyes meet.
He has me
the way an apple falls to earth
and the earth rises to greet it.
Lifting his
still breathing smallness
onto a large leaf,
I lay him in the soft touches
of spring throated grass
near the road
as sunlight and moonlight
sweep through each other
spinning tales of the
beginning and ending
of light.
©2017 The Last Light In The Moles Eyes Deanna
McKinstry-Edwards
mythopoetry.com
©2017 The
Last Light In The Moles Eyes Deanna McKinstry-Edwards mythopoetry.com
All Rights Retained
WE CARRY
We carry creation’s seed
in the nest of our bodies.
We carry homeless
worlds,
forgotten and forsaken.
We wear the earth
in baskets on our backs,
brimming with grasses and sticks.
We carry life-loving soil.
dusty and flood
soaked
it stains our
feet.
We carry the old wood
fires, and the future
skies.
We sit on mountain tops
weaving wounds into blankets
and balm for generations to come.
We carry the voices
of the valleys,
the deep, deep valleys
where meandering streams meet
the meadows singing
replenishing Hallelujahs.
We stand taller than pyramids
and buildings dedicated
to the sun, blinding light
and perfect measure.
We are the moon-keepers.
shepards of shadows
and shade, and the soul’s
never-ending thirst
for the murmurations
of meaning.
We carry our men
back to their hearts,
and they carry us
back to ours.
We
have grown in each other’s
branches, twisting, tender
with longing, longing to trust
who we really are.
How vulnerable.
We carry death, and sing it
back to life again.
We carry songs. We
sing.
We always sing.
Especially
when we’re broken,
and the whole world feels broken, too.
We are the song
that allows starry nights
their moisturing dark
for dry days, and those to come.
We carry the hearth
of heaven
in our touch
and voices.
We carry. We
carry.
We
Carry.
©2017 We Carry Deanna McKinstry-Edwards mythopoetry.com
©2017 We Carry Deanna McKinstry-Edwards
All Rights Retained ©2017 We Carry Deanna McKinstry-Edwards mythopoetry.com
CELERY SALAD AND OLD EYES
This is not a sad story.
Life moves on that’s all. Moves
around and through things
becoming something else,
continents shaking at their edges
trawling for missing pieces.
Take celery root. It’s tuberous
hardness cooked supple and soft,
becomes celery salad.
“No, I ‘ve never had celery salad,”
I told her.
She lives alone,
by a sacred fire of small things
made meaningful by her attention
and 96 year old hands dicing, chopping,
peeling, mixing mayonnaise, onion
and vinegar.
Late afternoon traffic on Sunset Boulevard,
framed in her living room windows,
lurches homeward,
the drivers, listening to tapes, music,
the news of murders and quaking continents,
a hundred leagues away they are from where they are,
split by long drives and the misgivings
of the day.
But with her, there are no misgivings,
she is already home, into her
evening rituals, present to
the smallest, and her cat
circling around her legs.
The rush is somewhere else.
Celery salad is being composed here
by 96 year old hands and
old eyes dimmed by macular
degeneration. Her soul’s
eyes are another story.
She is not what she was,
but always what she is.
The cutting board crackles
under her knife, the cat’s bell
jingles the air.
I’m sitting under the relaxed sky
of her roomy apartment, filled with
96 years of memories, china, photos,
animal figures, animal paintings,
stuffed animals, some who can speak
and sing…
Animals, animals, animals, part of
our shared sacraments and bond.
Her footsteps, barely audible,
fall like magnolia petals,
onto the linoleum. Will I ever walk this softly?
She is content. Prepared to live,
19 bottles of distilled water
within reach, and prepared to move on
to a place as certain and clear in her mind
as the purest stream and sky
she could imagine.
Do you know anyone like that?
To know even one soul,
like a single pelican
rising from a salty lagoon,
full of liftoff, fluidity and flight,
will lay you down at day’s end,
home again, with simple things,
and no rush.
©2017 Celery Salad And
Old Eyes Deanna McKinstry-Edwards mythopoetry.com
©2017 Celery Salad And Old Eyes Deanna McKinstry-Edwards All Rights Retained
Celery Salad And Old Eyes by Deanna McKinstry-Edwards is previously published in Mythopoetry Scholar: Annual Reflections In Depth Perspectives Volume 2 “Matter And Beauty”, January, 2011
©2017 Celery Salad And Old Eyes Deanna McKinstry-Edwards All Rights Retained
Celery Salad And Old Eyes by Deanna McKinstry-Edwards is previously published in Mythopoetry Scholar: Annual Reflections In Depth Perspectives Volume 2 “Matter And Beauty”, January, 2011
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