Be The Seed That Always Flowers
“Child of Mine” Bardic Poetry by Joseph S. Plum
Welcome:
Greetings and welcome to American Bardic Poet.
“Child of Mine”
This week I share a poem that my brothers and I received as a gift from the poet. He would compose new poems for us as presents for our birthdays. “Child of Mine” is a longer poem - this is the beginning section below.
As we’d go for long walks out in the forest, Dad would recite the poems and we’d repeat after him, learning as we walked. It was a way to keep up entertained out on the hill and also gave us all good memorization skills that we went on to use throughout our lives. I can still hear the leaves beneath our feet as we walked in rhythm to the poem, our voices carrying the words to the sky.
Good journey,
(The poet’s daughter.)
child of mine
child of mine
be the seed
that always flowers
bear the fruits of time
be this moment
becoming hours
ripen on the vine
be the sweet
that never sours
throttle back your mind
be the voice
of ancient powers
carry on this rhyme
be the children
who are the children
born of the promise
that was given
in the gardens of mankind
you are a ballet of shadows
a dance of lights
an earthly landscape
of endless insights
a sense of being living
in this time of becoming
you are a deep well of feeling
feeding an oasis
of homecoming.
Read about the poet and the bees here.
Read my post regarding punctuation and editing of the poems here.
Read the poem “Wild Wisdom” and a short essay I wrote about the forest here.
This is a page from the book, I Believe in Seeds: Affirmations for Rewilding, made possible by a grant from the BeWildReWild Fund at Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation. This book combines my watercolor paintings with Dad’s poems, and gave me a chance to try something different with punctuation. Also, it was such a beautiful moment when Dad saw my paintings and realized his poems were part of his daughter’s artwork.
I’m grateful.
I’ll write more next week. Hope to see you again then. Please consider sharing this post with someone you think may be interested in Dad’s poetry.
🙏🏼 Thank you for gathering here. May it be a blessing. 🙏🏼
About the Poet
Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Joe has over 16 hours of oral poetry memorized in his head. He pulls from this collection of rhyming lines to compose poems according to the energy of the audience listening. Joe does all of this without writing the poems down on paper or holding any notes.
Joe’s daughter, Emily Lupita, typed up his poems over the years and launched Dreaming Deer Press to publish his work. He now has nine poetry books for sale on Amazon that can be purchased on Joe’s website - here.
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I found the Starlord poem very calming and encouraging. Getting older can be a challenge. Thank you!