Service Worker We may not live to see the harvest, gather the bounty, savor the meal, or enjoy the kindly shade of the tree. These may all very well be the province of others. So let us not forget our purpose, overlook the importance of our labor, neglect to take notice of our responsibility orContinue reading “Service Worker”
Author Archives: C.M. Rivers
Rainforest Alliance
All sales of How To Carry Soup now support the Rainforest Alliance – a meaningful point of connection between the art of poetry and environmental protection. Art matters. Science matters. Earth matters. It matters. “Change the way you carry soup and watch the world open.”
Withlacoochee River, 1986
Strange, how there’s no money in bending spoons, levitating, walking through walls, eating fire. Stranger still, the mind’s tireless insistence on returning to the same vault of memory: a woven hammock bleached by the sun, beach glass, the texture of a Van Gogh, metallic oysters, cold beer, fried shrimp, French vanilla ice cream. Strangest ofContinue reading “Withlacoochee River, 1986”
Stone Lion
The face of the stone lion has turned white due to weather and time, two things I understand very little of, being neither meteorologist nor physicist. I only know that he reminds me of a Celtic warrior about to pick a fight, milky streaks spreading through the dark copper of his mane. A stone lionContinue reading “Stone Lion”
High Road
Once you have traveled in the four directions, along the main thoroughfare, and spent a good deal of time on back roads and side roads, putting one foot in front of the other until you reach a measure of satisfaction, it is possible you might find Continue reading “High Road”
Beginner’s Mind
Beginner’s Mind Spirit of breath and practice, holy mystery of movement and stillness, grant me the discipline to just sit here, though the old fires still burn in me. Grant me the wisdom to remain plainspoken at the doorstep of the mind’s entanglements. Let me keep a balanced, empty mind. Grant me patience, not onlyContinue reading “Beginner’s Mind”
This Light
The Good News
Excerpt from The Good News, a poem from my collection How To Carry Soup (Homebound Publications, 2020).
Net Man
“The point is that he had – as we all do in given measures – an unknowable wildness.”
Refuge
By day, a daydream ponderer who never gets her fill – by night, a barefoot wanderer who’s wandering still. With the bamboo wind and a golden rain-tree, what a lucky pilgrim she shall be.
C.M. Rivers 