everything is connected

Orb weaver
Webweaver
Storykeeper

wonders at the
man and woman
who move
beneath her —
the fine strings of connection
they don’t seem to notice

the man moves
and the woman follows
the woman speaks
and the man nods
somehow symbiotic

each of them
picks berries from
the autumn olive —
share the savoring —
pause and pucker
at the bittersweet

yesterday’s web
tangles in the woman’s hair
and the man assists —
white web entwined with
silver strands he hadn’t noticed
as threads of memory
spark around them

I wonder what you will look like with gray hair

but wisps of time and love
their midnight musings
only float on sunbeams now
as ephemeral as
she herself
her dance
on fine filaments
the dew, the stars,
the Universe

Photo by Rick Otten. Poem ©2023, Jen Payne. If you like this poem, you can read similar in my books and zines, available from Three Chairs Publishing on my ETSY SHOP. They come autographed, with gratitude and a small gift.

Chaos Theory

A woman takes a knee by the side of the road thinks: “Surely the Mourning Cloak I spied this morning is mourning. Having surveyed our condition from its higher vantage point, it must wonder, as I do, if the storm that fell so many trees, that destroyed this holy place, did so on purpose. Barring us from passage. Asking us who we think we are, as Frost wrote, insisting always on our own way so. Our own way. God help us. Who DO we think we are…littering these open spaces with our trash, leaving our detritus and dog shit behind? Dragging our noisy selves and our machineries along paths as if we have some lofty right? Infesting the woods with our toxic nature, our assumed religions, our fabricated joy? Infesting the world with our opinions, our politics, our petty, pathetic proclivities? Insisting on our own way and ever ignorant of the ripple effect, the consequences?”

A woman takes a knee by the side of the road — butterfly, startled, flies away, a world away a world dies — and we think she is praying.