All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Ithuriel's Spears, Fiesta Flowers, Wild Hyacinth

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RUNNING WITH MY POWER

I hike where even the humus breathes slightly,
huge trees exhaling a breath that cleanses
the darkened shrubs of my lungs
and awakens flowers of energy

all over my body. I feel
the drumming deep in roots and rocks
as snowmelt cascades down the slopes,
the blood of other creatures pounding

in my ears, coursing through countless
veins, the heartbeat of mother earth pulsing
in bushes and trees, in the bobcat
across the stream, in the strider

sliding away from the bank
on a skin of light. There I find
my power, releasing black spiders
from my subtle body through a hole

in my back, healing myself through grief
and forgiveness, cleansing
the astral flowers of my aura
until they open for the powers

of harmony. Together, my power
and I strut through a meadow
to the ruins of a stone house
as coyotes cut loose a howl,

and we dash over hills on ancient trails
from pounding stone to pounding stone,
feeling our way through a cave where I see
brilliant archetypes: a pure, white,

four-petaled flower burgeoning
into a flower with countless petals,
the four elements blossoming into
the thousand-petaled lotus; a gray

figure eight, floating above my head;
and a golden-equal armed cross, the Archangels
at each end slowly growing clearer.
I emerge from the cave to perform

a ritual invoking the Archangels,
the four elements flowing into me
so that I feel the power of those forces
embodied as human forms

with mighty wings, all a flowing,
a balancing, as I lounge
on a pounding stone at the edge
of the cliff and pray for release

from attachment and desire. I am
a hawk floating high
above the oaks, my body towering
into the heavens, assuming the form

of a god, my own head the fiery head
of a hawk, my aura flung beyond the edges
of the solar system, the sun beating down,
manifold creatures in its light whispering

to me. Seven pestles wait, placed
on a rock near the pounding stone.
Once I was certain the Earth
would be free of us,

everything that I and so many others
had fought for in ruins--but now
I stand on the pounding stone
under the living sun, awakening

the Tree of Life within myself
as I make a brilliant cross of light,
a wren foraging a few feet away,
huge astral antlers branching

from my head, an inverted rainbow
in my heart, a flock of bushtits
descending on an oak, so close: I am
now no more threatening than the sun.