Painting and Prose by Janet Whittle Freedman

Catagory:

Earth Poems

We live in a sacred place and 
We are blind to it 
Spreading asphalt and soiled McDonald's bags 
We make loud noises and mar the earth 
with scars and pits 
 
Amidst these abominations we are daily given magic
The breeze through trees, sunlight quivering on water,
endless patterns, birds, blooms
But we do not notice that
We live in a sacred place

My paintings are about fragments
Fragments of the sacred
a vein in a leaf, a pattern in sand
speak to my soul
 
People will like them or not
I do not care
They are fragments yet whole
A leaping to the sacred 


*************************
When I was a child 
There was holiness
About the woods 

Still, now, on this
Lone undeveloped corner
As we sit at a red light 

I glimpse it.

There were trees here once
Broad and thick
But they have passed

Do fragments of what was 
Still echo in microscopic cells
Of this soil?

And there were farmer’s fields once
Dug, riveted
And lush with corn and fruit.

Gone too. 

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