SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Morning walk enchantment
Anne Silver’s woods
Noona O'Riley
Crestone, Colorado
Noona O’Riley is one of a kind. No label fits her, but one is tempted to call her a “community poet,” rather than a literary poet. For years Noona has been composing poems about friends and family, neighbors and neighborhood, about her community, and sharing these poems, eyes closed, reciting them from memory, but never writing them down. Pure oral poetry in the bardic tradition.
Only recently, Noona's many friends talked her into putting her poems on paper, in a collection published as a paperback under the title, I Meant to Tell You, by Western Eye Press.
who went walking
who went walking with them
into the morning light
the forest air
down to the Cedars
and stood in the thoughts of aging branches
and knew the world through kinship with a tree
who went walking
who went walking with them
down to the cunning creek
sat and stared into the water
beguiled to surrender
to join the glassy realms
and give all the rest away
who was green and who turned golden
under the arcing sky
stood in the grass the light and shadows
the warm medallions of the sun
heard the birds and saw the branches
rising up from trees
who make us more than we are
stepped on stones that never move
and walked into a careful closet of small trees
where neck bones of an elk
lay on the ground
in a graceful arc
white like stars laid out across the heavens
who went walking in the morning meadow light
yet stopped, turned, walked away
to live enclosed, shut off in houses
blinded by walls that give back
none of all they hide away
who turned away from the hearts of birds
the ancestral cloak of trees
away from the diamond life
and who remained behind
with footprints in the grasses
and with eyes.