The following three poems can also be found on Soul-Lit -‘a journal of spiritual poetry’…

Filament

With looking-

the mirror reveals to me

a lineage; ancient and long.

It seems this humanness

collects lifetimes along a timeless timeline.

It becomes a group effort,

having only appropriated this body.

I am along for the ride-

am being taken.

A sheath within a sheath,

this body beneath the being.

I find the filament-

a fiber which threads ancestry,

a fine fiber which conducts divinity.

I find and follow,

am being taken.

As the Last Elder Goes 

As the last elder goes, we shuffle forward.

Slip into new mantles, new titles.

No longer casting our view out

and up towards another,

but out against our own mirror.

To see we are in front of ourselves now.

What a wonder to have no other to need from.

No other’s expectations, only our own.

And to find at last,

we are the audience we long for.

If My Mother

If my mother had lived,

she’d be dead by now.

Had the cancer not corroded

her lungs then, it would have

by now. Disease or age,

it is all accumulation.

Had she lived beyond her death

she would have spared her mother

losing a daughter. Spared her mother

sitting in the stiff hospital chair

saying to me or to no one “This isn’t

how it is supposed to go.”

Had she lived beyond her death

she would have known my children.

Had she lived beyond her death

perhaps she would have known me

the way the camellia plant

knows each blossom it bears.

— Laura Hooper

I love the morning air

quiet

empty

still

none of the busyness of daytime

clouding it.

Clear

it touches my skin

and I remember-

I remember something 

I forgot 

this

in my heart -

love 

and all of that

but you know -

you know all of this.

— Laura Hooper