SageGreenJournal.org

voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary

Morning walk enchantment

Anne Silver’s woods

Noona O'Riley

Crestone, Colorado

Noona O’Riley is one of a kind. No label fits her, but one is tempted to call her a “community poet,” rather than a literary poet. For years Noona has been composing poems about friends and family, neighbors and neighborhood, about her community, and sharing these poems, eyes closed, reciting them from memory, but never writing them down. Pure oral poetry in the bardic tradition.

Only recently, Noona's many friends talked her into putting her poems on paper, in a collection published as a paperback under the title, I Meant to Tell You, by Western Eye Press.

who went walking

who went walking with them

into the morning light

the forest air

down to the Cedars

and stood in the thoughts of aging branches

and knew the world through kinship with a tree

who went walking

who went walking with them

down to the cunning creek

sat and stared into the water

beguiled to surrender

to join the glassy realms

and give all the rest away

who was green and who turned golden

under the arcing sky

stood in the grass the light and shadows

the warm medallions of the sun

heard the birds and saw the branches

rising up from trees

who make us more than we are

stepped on stones that never move

and walked into a careful closet of small trees

where neck bones of an elk

lay on the ground

in a graceful arc

white like stars laid out across the heavens

who went walking in the morning meadow light

yet stopped, turned, walked away

to live enclosed, shut off in houses

blinded by walls that give back

none of all they hide away

who turned away from the hearts of birds

the ancestral cloak of trees

away from the diamond life

and who remained behind

with footprints in the grasses

and with eyes.

RETURN TO TOP >

SageGreenJournal.org is a non-commercial project, an online anthology, to share a poetic vision of the land we love.

We have no permanent office although we do have deep roots in western Colorado.

You can write us at Box 160 Norwood CO 81423, or better yet, email us, by clicking 

or, if you use a webmail system, write to hello (at) sagegreenjournal.org