Mnemonics

Photograph by Natalie Anderson

By Natalie Anderson

i.

Dark as the honey that

fell from the valley

of the spring,

the ground turns

Mother sheds a memory

that weaves through all eternity

not just when

you saw her for merely

a pretty transient body,

you antonym of integrity,

but

when her existence cascaded into eras upon eras

of femininity

When she birthed humanity.

Seed sheds defense

releasing tenderness

Breaking through the dew of morning,

dreams act in ceremony

with the sky.

Beneath your shut eyes,

like salamander’s slow movement under decaying tree trunks,

shadows dance wave-like 

in the light of the transmuted.

ii.

The water

Stoic as all time

Makes no sudden shift

as you climb ecstatic

through the river-hugged tree limbs

Look to your love

and realize

In your words, 

there is nothing truer than in your eyes

In fact words

have a funny tendency of constructing lies for

in each eye there’s a prism 

a schism

confounding clarity.

iii.

Big brown bat

flies at the sunset

A looming silhouette

hangs over yet.

To sit still by your own will

that is powerful.

The orchid fair was canceled

The world music fair still plays out on the

radio, announced by robots.

In rainy kitchen windows,

people stir their pots.

Natalie Anderson is an environmentalist, agro-ecologist, musician, and writer. She completed a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies and Agroecology at UC Santa Cruz. Her poems are produced from a place of deep love and observation within context of the human experience and our interrelated existences.