Tara Sophia Mohr Poetry

Tara Mohr

My nose and mind has been wondering through the book Your Other Names, by Tara Sophia Mohr. Tara is a writer and a coach you can learn more about her and explore her work at her website (http://www.taramohr.com/) Here are some of the poems that I especially loved:

~The Pressure By Tara Sophia Mohr~

the pressure to have an arm that looks like that
and legs that look like that
and a belly like that

pressure to tone this to that
to be a size this
weigh that

How many days have you lost?
How many murders of yourself?

How many times have you
clamped down because of it,
quieted the moon because of it,
or didn’t ask the sun to dance?

She mourned this one morning,
and wondered,
what would it be like, without the pressure?

~Your Other Name By Tara Sophia Mohr~

If your life doesn’t often make you feel
like a cauldron of swirling light –

If you are not often enough a woman standing above a mysterious fire,
lifting her head to the sky –

You are doing too much, and listening too little.

Read poems. Walk in the woods. Make slow art.
Tie a rope around your heart, be led by it off the plank,
happy prisoner.

You are no animal. You are galaxy with skin.
Home to blue and yellow lightshots,
making speed-of-light curves and racecar turns,
bouncing in ricochet -

Don’t slow down the light and turn it into matter
with feeble preoccupations.

Don’t forget your true name:
Presiding one. Home for the gleaming. Strong cauldron for the feast of light.

Strong cauldron for the feast of light:
I am speaking to you.
I beg you not to forget.

 

~The Rhythm By Tara Sophia Mohr ~

In any creative feat
(by which I mean your work, your art, your life)
there will be downtimes.

Or so it seems.

Just as the earth is busy before the harvest

and a baby grows before its birth,

there is no silence in you.
There is no time of nothingness.

What if,
during the quiet times, when the idea flow is hushed and hard to find
you trusted (and yes I mean trusted)
that the well was filling, the waters moving?

What if you trusted

that for the rest of eternity,

without prodding, without self-discipline,

without getting over being yourself,

you would be gifted every ounce of productivity you need?

What would leave you? What would open?

And what if during the quiet times you ate great meals

and leaned back to smile at the stars,

and saw them there, as they always are,

nourishing you?

There are seasons and harvest is only a fraction of one of them.
We forget this.

There is the rhythm that made everything.

The next time you stand in the kitchen, leaning,the next time a moment of silence catches you there,

hear it, that rhythm, and let it place a stone in your spine.
Let it bring you some place beautiful.

 

~In the end By Tara Sophia Mohr~

In the end
you won’t be known
for the things you did,
or what you built,
or what you said.

You won’t even be known
for the love given
or the hearts saved,

because in the end you won’t be known.

You won’t be asked, by a vast creator full of light:
What did you do to be known?

You will be asked: Did you know it,
this place, this journey?

What there is to know can’t be written.
Something between the crispness of air
and the glint in her eye
and the texture of the orange peel.

What you’ll want a thousand years from now is this:
a memory that beats like a heart–
a travel memory, of what it was to walk here,
alive and warm and textured within.

Sweet brightness, aliveness, take-me-now-ness that is life.

You are here to pay attention. That is enough.