Maria Conley
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Maria Conley is a graduate of Lesley College and Bridgewater State College. She is listed in the National Directory of Poets and Fiction Writers and was accepted into The New England Poetry Club. As a teacher at Brockton High School she tries to interest her students in the reading and writing of poetry. She is also an instructor for Framingham State College where she teaches Poetry Across the Curriculum and Children's Literature. In addition to academics Maria Conley is a Shamanic Reiki Master and a Master of Runic Studies. She facilitates drumming and Reiki circles in the South Shore area.
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The Death Teachings
I.
Death says,
I am opening in you
I am opening in your mouth like a flower.
It is all right, Speak now,
your words will be a riot of color,
a blooming bouquet.
I am with you, Death tells me.
I am opening you.
It is hard to be solid,
hard to be stately.
Be a rage of flowers
awakening in your openings,
opening and aching.
Now you know things.
Now you sing
like a cut brilliantly bleeding.
I open, Death says. I prepare
for not always, not here, not
tomorrow only oh how beautiful
it is, how beautiful it is to be opened,
to be open to all that is.
II.
Death says,
I am opening in you.
I am opening in your mouth like a flower.
Be a rage of flowers
awakening in your openings,
mouth the names of all who have passed,
all the deaths you've swallowed of
bird and plant, beast and tree,
sky-deaths, skin-deaths,
let them be for remembering.
Chant them upon beads.
Say them in a rhythm.
Sing them with the sea..
Appoint remembers.
This is the death teaching;
I do not go quietly away.
Prophesy and you will see
I always come into being.
I am opening in you,
opening in everything.
Speak of me in flowers.
III.
Death says,
I will be with you
in the noon hours,
I am also in the trees,
look for me under their veils
. in the afternoons
when they are whisperi
ng. The trees, ominous wisdom-
keepers recite the long list then
back to the beginning.
Listen! Everyone has lost
someone.
Someone has to be missing.
Loss is a long nagging song.
IV.
Death says,
I am the song at noon that holds its breath,
all the sorrow of the world in the bowl of the belly.
Who died you wonder but don't know.
It is everyone, all of you together,
all of you separately,
all of you
on the next breath,
in the same one.
Don't tell anyone you knew it all along
how you are all one sea of air
and I blow into you,
you breathe through me,
we sing together
one long note-eternity.
I am the sorrow song at noon.
Waiting
I am waiting
for inspiration to blow down this house.
so I can weed through the rubble,
salvage words for you.
I am waiting
for tongues of fire to rain,
burn from my lips so
I can kiss you with poems.
perhaps even save you.
I am waiting to photosynthesize
sunlight, be the leaves
of a tree whispering out to you
what I hear from
inspiration.
I am waiting for her
like hail in summer
so everybody knows
from my exhalations
I came through.
I am waiting for her
like that warm day in February
like the thawing of my own being.
I am waiting
for inspiration like a dipper of stars
poured out on me
from which I'm drinking
all possibility.
I am waiting for inspiration.
May she not come gently.
May she strike me,
hunt me down
drop me
with an arrow of hope
so I may at least
bleed beginnings.
Who’s to say
where light is
In the body.
Is it in the fingers
Like leaves sipping the sun?
Or the palms dried and veined
Shrinking upward like delicate cups
Balanced on branches?
Is it in the feet, the roots
Kissing deep light that will never touch
Them in their dark waiting?
Or in the belly, the trunk
Where the years we receive
Will be rounded and measured?
Who can say where light is in the body?
Could it be in the blood
And that our blood and light congeal
Into rubies?
So then we are what,
Jeweled kings or thieves?
