This collection of 100 poems by Don Hynes resonate with the rhythms of crashing waves and towering forests from the heart of the Pacific Northwest. Hynes explores the rugged beauty of trees, rocks, and rolling waves through an intimately personal lens.
More than nature poetry, these are soul poems – borne of memory, heartache, and dream visions. They reach transcendentally across time and space to connect with the reader’s own experiences of change and self-discovery.
Poems that reach into lifetimes – past, present and those to be imagined, and in the tradition of America’s most enlightened poets such as Mary Oliver and William Stafford, speak in a quiet voice of your place on earth and the place you are preparing.
Feeding my animal body, I eat prisoners’ food, listen to the warden’s drone on static-filled speakers. Though grown soft, my spirit body still flies through the barred window catching sight of Sirius. I hear my power above the cell-block din: “You have a choice! Feed your spirit body while you
Nestled in the half-moon valley, night clouds drift past in rose-tinted skies. Stirred by Earth’s turn to the sweet milk of light, the land awakens under rain-soaked moss, quiet as my heart in morning prayer.
Dawn’s first glow rises in the east, stirring the valley with the touch of life— orange blush bathes the sky, beacon lit across the divide. In the quiet hush between night and day, I set my compass by sorrow’s star, and cross the threshold from shadow to light.
