Protection #poetry #earthweal

Love
I want to shelter deep within your heart
for I am part of you, as you of me:
there is no shelter when we are apart

Love
I want to shelter you within my arms
from a thousand thousand worldly cares 
and harms
in silence, as we listen to the wind’s song

Child
nine moons I sheltered you beneath my breast,
I wrote these songs while you lay sleeping on my chest
I shelter you within this nest of redbrick

Child
I hear the wind sing with a mournful lullaby, while
we sleep in peacefully within the cyclops’ eye
of a storm from which there may well be no shelter

Only this:
Love
within my heart
Love
within my arms
Child
beneath my breast
Child
A lullaby
for peace, in love and hope we rest

© 2022 experimentsinfiction.com. All Rights Reserved.

Written for earthweal

For this week’s challenge, Brendan asks us to write of shelter:

You can address any of these questions, or come up with any of your own:

  • Where do you find shelter?
  • How do you create shelter?
  • Do you share your shelter, and how?
  • What have your learned from our wild mother about shelter, nesting, dens?
  • What is it to journey, finding only temporary shelter at day’s end?
  • What does homelessness teach us about shelter, or the abandonment of homeland by the refugee or the yearning for homecoming by the prodigal?
  • When does shelter become the greedy cloak of invisibility?
  • How would you compose (or recompose) the Biblical manger scene depicting the birth of Christ?
  • How are poems shelters?
  • What does it mean to be “safe” and “sound”?
  • What shelter can we offer others in this uprooting time? How do we spread the canopy?

Let’s construct an earthweal shelter!

48 thoughts on “Protection #poetry #earthweal

Add yours

  1. Gorgeously written, Ingrid !Child /A lullaby / for peace, in love and hope we rest “

  2. This is SO beautiful, Ingrid – the more so since shelter and safety are not a given any longer – so tenuous these peaceful lives we are living. Your poem expresses all the tenderness of love for partner and child. I love it.

  3. What a lovely collection of ways to think about and experience shelter! I love the gentle emotion and feeling of safety I experience in these evocative words. <3

  4. Ingrid, you have created a stunning response to a prompt that offered many possible directions. A most authentic, protective, and fierce love pouring from your lines. 💖

  5. Ingrid, I love this post about a mother sheltering her child. It is so beautiful and touching! <3 It brought back memories of becoming a new mother at age 19.

    I had always thought of motherhood as something soft and sweet. Shortly after my daughter was born, I was standing in the kitchen looking out the screen door when the realization struck me like a bolt of lightning: I would gladly KILL anyone who tried to harm my child! Motherhood is a fierce emotion!

  6. What a lovely testament to the love between mother and child. I hope the homeless mothers and children of this earth find shelter in the love that binds them.

  7. This is beautiful, Ingrid. You’ve woven a blanket of peace and love to keep out the cold that comes closer every day. Heartfelt and perfectly written.

  8. Yes! Yes, yes! So totally true to hold to love in the “cyclop’s eye” of the storm. Life is learning love. Bravo for expressing it!

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