awe in a bud

 

the promise of the bud

an inch and a half of sleet

whitens what it can of the ground:

leaves, sticks, dried grasses

clutter a view that isn't the soft white of snow,

sun, and above freezing temperatures today,

have released the thick icy varnish from branch and trunk,

I sit outside and study the pink dogwood's lines against the sky,

all so spartan and as if drawn in sketching lines

that maximize how to fill the space they have earned,

at the tip of many branches a spherical bud

waits patiently and asserts its promise,

 

within it, in some alchemical magic, awaits a transformation

that should happen three months from now,

when potential exuberantly releases itself,

when leaves erupt all over the tree

to capture the light and the energy

that allow gratuitous beauty to emerge,

flowers to celebrate a new season,

the world I want to know is all about awe,

I love to see it become itself and dazzle us,

how also good it is to see it full, but awaiting its time,

as an educator, I saw the tight buds of my students,

and I reveled in the opening and expressing of their promise.

by Henry H. Walker

January 26, ‘26

translating dream language

 

the oracle of dreams

in the middle of the night my dreams make me face them,

all my unfulfilled hopes and my unrealized fears

worm their way into my dreams,

I often feel like a pilgrim

visiting the oracle at Delphi,

hearing clearly the words and seeing the images given to me

but flummoxed by the ambiguity of the surface meaning,

deep within me I feel the warnings, the charge,

but it's cursed hard to retranslate dream language into what I can know,

I have to blunder through,

to bludgeon the truth

from the metaphors within which I live at night,

so that I can move forward,

I have to trust a translation that seems, at best, approximate,

and, at times, inexplicable.

by Henry H. Walker

January 23, ‘26

we lose common sense and follow fear

 

coarseness besets us

there are finer qualities to our nature,

those that Thoreau compared to the bloom of fruit,

that the coarseness of our culture

often can't even see, let alone nurture,

when the going get tough,

or we convince ourselves it's tough,

or social media and demagogues convince us it's tough,

we submit to fear and the reptile brain,

parts of us that enabled us to survive

when real danger beset us,

now oligarchs casually use our fears

to increase their share of the pie,

so that one person's worth can be more 

than the combined wealth of half the country,

they can convince us that the "other" is out to get us,

too often we lose our common sense

and swallow the Kool-Aid we are spoon-fed 

by social media in bots and malicious AI,

we are lost in our weaknesses,

and we lose the best of who we can be

when we follow the worse of those before us.

by Henry H. Walker

January 27, ‘26

my journey to now

 

the cusps of my life

my therapist asked me to write my own eulogy,

hoping that this exercise would help me to buck up,

that I could then compare all that is positive in my life

with whatever is negative,

at least in terms of my own actions,

in the exercise, I was struck by all the cusps:

how and where I made countless decisions to go this way, or that,

how and where the universe challenged

by opening or closing doors,

by giving or denying possible paths,

it scares me to realize that so much of who I am,

that so much of what I am proud of,

is the result of choices that now seem right to me

but the "me" that made them

could have been paralyzed if I'd realized what was at stake:

relationships, college, career,

child-rearing, finding my own gifts and expressing them,

nothing, no one, is more vital to who I am than Joan,

and our journey to be as one

scares me with what might have instead have happened,

I feel good about my life, 

about my life making a difference for the good,

it scares me to realize that the abyss could have pulled me in,

and instead I blundered through the cusps

and found myself true to hope

and to who I want to be.

by Henry H. Walker

January 22, ‘26

building relationships

 

the vitality of connections

I am driven by a powerful desire to connect,

to make solid the tentative lines

that can seem too faint to feel real,

as if all-too-ready to dissolve

and leave us as if we are islands in a dark empty sea,

I use food, gifts, words,

to show that who I am

cares about who they are,

all of that giving is both selfless and selfish,

for I don't want to be alone,

and I bet the other finds more worth

through being validated and seen, and cared-for,

than in laboring alone 

with no routes to other people,

I remember another teacher I worked with

whose selflessness cascaded into the selfish,

needing and requiring the students to revolve around them,

early on in my career as an educator,

I wrote that the goal of the teacher 

should be to make themselves dispensable,

so that the student can then soar

and find the others that complete them,

the students so self-assured that they find their own paths,

their own companions on their odyssey

to let their lights shine,

and find others' lights, 

pushing back the darkness.

by Henry H. Walker

January 29, ‘26