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.
Moon lover, devotee of the stars, I keep watch on the winter sky, welcoming darkness where light burns brightest, and stars sing to the children of Earth— “don’t lose faith, we travel through heaven.” Reading of “Keeping Watch” with music by Louis Armstrong.
I step from the cold cave of regret and find myself among the living. Past and future dissolve as mist rises off the water. Disciples of the present moment, we listen to creek sounds, and a symphony of trees rustling in the wind, hearts as one with the sacred.
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
