Journey of the Heart

  Dawn by Caroline Mellor And when you first stepped out into the pink blush of dawn did you feel the soft, dew-soaked earth rise to kiss your feet? Did you notice the trees  breathe blessings down upon you in luminous bundles of green and gold, how every breath of woodsmoke, mist and mulch filled your lungs like a cool river? Did you feel yourself attached somehow to each fading star of night like a puppet held on threads of silver light? And when the beautiful future which you dreamed of so long  down that hard broken road finally burst over the horizon and tumbled towards you like a wave —  Were you ready to catch it? *This poem appears in the author's debut, newly released poetry collection The  Honey  in the Bones: Poems to  Rewild  the Soul ,  Golden  Dragonfly  Press, Dec. 2022. For a copy of your own , click here.   Caroline Mellor   lives in East Sussex, U.K. with her husband and two children. Her writing has featured in Braided Way, The Green Parent, Women's Spiritua

  The Tug I remember you, rooted into the pasture, set against autumn’s breath as I walked by: your capillary arms reaching into life, bare and delicate, like morning and moss, and the soft consideration that beauty remains, even after all adornment has decayed. Yesterday, cawing winds sprinkled you with a murder of crows. Today, you beckon chirping cardinals from across the fence. The brevity of these black and red-feathered frocks hint at all those little moments that open and close  before us, like mouths of newborns asking to be nursed. Now, I want to shield you from winter, offer you milk from a warm breast, forgetting that this pause, is also necessary. I seem to forget many things these days, and wonder if I might also stand, unadorned, before cold and rain, my green gone, extended into life’s opacity with branches open—trusting I am inhabiting fields where I’m meant to be, syncopating with earth, releasing leaves  into the mist, when cold winds come tugging. (This poem first ap