Earth Pathways Showcase

The little sticks that guard my heart have snapped
and something raw is quivering there.
This I place in your hands
this is how I trust you

you are the river that leads my aloneness to the ocean,
you are the song that brings me into the choir.
And turned outward from its hiding place
that shameful thing,
which did seem to be my failing,
is nothing more
than the pattern of a longing to be whole.

Friendship © Hannah Malhotra

I return from the field with gypsy feet,
with seams of earth between my toes
and red varnish chipped with memories of stones and fallen branches,
scraped and climbed.
My gypsy feet danced on the earth
and I wore a long skirt filled with sky
and naked legs.
Though I have returned to the city
and enclosed myself in the concrete rhythms of our time my heart dances still
like a flutter of bright silk in the breeze:
my heart still moves with an ancient freedom.

Gypsy Feet © Hannah Malhotra

When I met your outer form
a seed inside me stirred and woke up.
Now the spring rain of your love
opens that seed and I remember you!
I remember the breath of my being
which is joined with yours,
and though people think I am only one
I am not.
I am with you
and we are One.

The Kernel © Hannah Malhotra

We were long-limbed and smooth-skinned children
guided by some kind of primitive knowing
that kept us crouching knee-deep in the summer grass,
threading daisies, making our offerings for the trees.

On our yellow sun-baked square of earth
we heard nothing of the city coiling deafly around us,
the cars droning north, east, south and west.
City children on a stamp patch of Eden,
we danced a slow sylph dance on thin brown legs,
circling the slender trunks of the silver birch trees,
caressing the leaves in our sapling fingers..
Watched only by the shadow forms of our adult selves,
stirring inside us, unknown,
we wrapped our daisy chains
and sang words from some ancient unwritten human ache.

Tree Dance © Hannah Malhotra