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

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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!