I Am A Willow Bone Framework Supporting This Tent Of Skin
I Am A Willow Bone Framework Supporting This Tent Of Skin
“Sightless” Bardic Poetry by Joseph S. Plum
Welcome:
Greetings and welcome to American Bardic Poet.
“Sightless”
I’ll always remember standing on the ocean shore with my father at the end of US HWY 1, literally the end of the road. The poet and I watched a dolphin swim in the waves. The birds flew in a cloudless sky, watching us from above. He started to recite this poem.
My father knew I was a human reservoir filling with the floodwaters of another dimension during this time in my life, fraught with unsolicited metamorphosis. He knew I was dark blood running, touching sand. The poet knew I was fixed sightless on an empty sky.
It was healing to know someone else understood what I was feeling that day.
Good journey,
(The poet’s daughter.)
sightless
I am a human reservoir
filling with the flood waters
of another dimension
where I am a willow
bone framework supporting
this tent of skin.
I am a crystallized vortex
of unearthly wind opening
directly into the source
of this vision
which burns within
where I am a child
gently cradled
against the land.
I am dark blood running
touching sand
where I am a rough
hallowed wooden bowl.
I am a metal-hued
tight-lipped soul
where I am a wind-drawn
naked eye.
I am fixed sightless
on an empty sky.
Read about the poet and the bees here.
Read my post regarding the punctuation and editing of the poems here.
Read the poem, “The Sun Has Traveled Well” 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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