Welcome to WNIJ's Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems from northern Illinois poets. This week's poem is by Bear Wolf.
Wolf is a Shawnee Gypsy Jew social justice humanist who lost count of his tattoos somewhere around 20. This world makes no sense to him, so he makes music and poetry. Today he talks about the changes we go through in life with his poem “The Seasons of our Souls.”
Be like water
Go with the flow
Adapt
You can’t punch puddles
But water can boil over
Singe the skin from within
Until life becomes
Unbearable
Water can freeze solid
To the point that it won’t
Be moved
Lest movement and motion
Become danger and destruction
The devastating wake
Of glaciers grown wild
Melting away millions of miles
Water may be able to weather the storm
But the weather that water creates
Can bring devastation
Erode away at creation
As the waves crash away at the shores
Until it becomes impossible to ignore
Be like water
Go with the flow
Adapt
You can’t punch puddles
But they can most certainly punch you
So stand like trees
Feel the breeze in your hair
As it leaves a trail on the wind
Breathing from within
To bring voice to the choices that need
To be
Ancestors freely roam in your soul
To grow
Seek the sky by asking why
Feel the reasons we deny
Standing like the trees
But how can leaves breathe
When the very air deceives
Our needs
Our roots contract in a desperate act
Like a gut punch
Drains the will to perceive
Can we answer back
This branch attack
Or leave our lungs
To evolve into toxic cracks
That crater through
Our very attempts
To take a moment
And just breathe
No more waiting for the smoke to clear
It’s time to breathe fire
In arrears
Make up for so many lost years
These fears have taken up too much space
This scorched earth is no resting place
Phoenix fires still leave layers of ash
So where can we grow from here
Anger and passion may be in fashion
But lasting growth only comes from evolution
So the spirit must be willing to navigate real revolution
And true retribution
So be like water
Stand like trees
Breathe in deep
Blaze higher degrees
Encourage the spirits to fly out free
How else will we ever get to where we need to be
- Yvonne Boose is a current corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. It's a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms like WNIJ. You can learn more about Report for America at wnij.org.
