I’ve been reading (and thoroughly enjoying) Starhawk’s novel Walking to Mercury. Several passages jumped out for me the other day, and as I copied them into my journal I found myself breaking the lines to make them into poems. (Maya is the name of the main character in the novel.)
***
Maybe this world is a thigh bone
trumpet, a temple horn through
which compassion calls. When we
respond, miracles happen.
– Maya, p. 412
***
Dead, he could have been anything
we wanted him to be. But alive, he was always
a small danger, a continual secret that we had
to bury, lest he turn up and turn into something
we didn’t expect and couldn’t cope with.
– Maya, p. 415
***
That’s why human beings were harder to love
than mountains, she thought. People were always
constructing themselves, using each other
as blue prints and foils and mirrors. Mountains were just
mountains, high or low, craggy or rounded,
forested or bare. They formed themselves
not in relationship to some ideal but in response
to real things: the shifting of the earth’s
plates, the pressure of molten lava, the action
of wind and rain and running water.
– Maya, p. 416
(all quotes from Walking to Mercury by Starhawk, 1997 Bantam edition)
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