“With No Language but a Cry”

The Coyotes surely understand it.

Their primal sound

melding death and birth, pain and passion.

Our Scottie dog surely understood it,

howling with all the agony of Scotland.

The mother cows

bleating their grief when their calves are taken…

The deer

stomping their hooves and rubbing their foreheads

in an expression of emotion

that leaves me gaping in wonder.

The parents wailing in a playground in Pakistan . . .

My friends waiting for six year old Sophi to finish yet another round

of chemo . . .

Pieces of ourselves flying off our bodies, flying off our faces . . .

Emitting no words . . . not even organized cries, only high-pitched gasps,

trying to knit ourselves, our faces, our children, our planet

back together.

~ Barbara Jalon Hiles Mesle © 3/16

the land of enchantment

Not that I could forget even for a moment, but this is Nuevo Mexico–the land of enchantment. Here the light is different. Brown is coral with copper and slate with pearl in bronze with smokey specs of silvery cerulean. My college friend Dan once said no one knows what is really happening inside brown until he’s gone to the desert.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. New Mexico also blends blue and green in a thousand ways . . . even the swimming pool water is turquoise. It’s like the lens I’m seeing everything through has also altered the function of color . . . color is not just what it looks like but what it feels like here.

Yesterday, my friend gifted me with a 90-min massage with a shamanic man I’ll call Merlin. It hurt so bad I cried . . . I mean he wasn’t going to stop pressing his point until I cried, and once I started, I couldn’t stop even when I tried. It wasn’t even about physical pain any more. He put his hand over my eyes and I saw those bright lights that happen in false darkness. Then Merlin traced my tears with his fingers across my forehead and up into my hair. Next, he cupped his palm over my eyes and said see the vision now. That’s when his hand became a night sky . . . a coyote started howling out of my own voice. I was both in that room and somewhere out in the desert under a dark cloth of stars and I wasn’t me.

This is, after all, the land of enchantment . . . it’s not like they try to keep that a secret in New Mexico. Says so right on the license plates.

– September 2014, Albuquerque NM

Tabhair póg dom, táim Éireannach

If you’re lucky enough to be Irish, you’re lucky enough.