> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.journal.ninthheaven.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 4 Poems by Barbara Siegel Carlson - URL: https://www.journal.ninthheaven.co/literature/4-poems-by-barbara-siegel-carlson/ - Published: 2025-07-21T08:10:21.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-13T15:26:28.000Z - Description: The natural world teaches lessons about human life and its expansion into the spiritual and metaphysical. Winter branches and onions become metaphors for larger truths. Art and music are also inspirations to deeper understanding. - Author: Barbara Siegel Carlson - Tags: Literature & Poetry, Poetry, Issue I - Blue Winter, #Import 2025-10-08 13:07 The natural world teaches lessons about human life and its expansion into the spiritual and metaphysical. Winter branches and onions become metaphors for larger truths. Art and music are also inspirations to deeper understanding. Looking at a work of art, listening to music, reading philosophy, taking a walk, hearing the news, going to a convenience store: these stir memory and imagination, and through the language open the channels toward deepened awareness, greater wonder, heightened love and sense of the sacredness of life. **I wake to be unlocked** *by Barbara Siegel Carlson* at cloudy dawn, following a killdeer, come to a northern evening primrose red-leaved by the roots, summer humidity so heavy it leaves footprints past the knapweed, hare’s foot clover, yarrow, the soft blushed sheepbit, each dead and living daisy, a clump of down rippling in the middle of the road between goose turds and gray feathers, cottonwood leaves hanging above the path rush I wake to be among, forgetful, while the water lilies’ starry flesh glows like the rain on the oak leaves, the gold lace of a half-eaten leaf, as the crow of many colors that just landed on the empty road under the white sun looks up, lets out a single caw, as though what burns behind the clouds has no boundary or sorrow. **InvisibleHome** *by Barbara Siegel Carlson* These dark lines make a fan, a gargantuan feather waving and wavering, but what roots underneath from a source well hidden fills me, lifts me weaving and woven of what has been stranded, gathered to be emptied, as the light of the soul fills the body, a bird its shell, a nest of winter branches. **Friedrich’s Monk** *by Barbara Siegel Carlson* Tiny figure, who are you searching for in this tapestry of space threaded between darkness and light? The brother, your childhood bedmate who drowned saving you? The sister you loved to pieces? Your mother who said she was leaving? Your father who never did? The boats your painter erased are now spectral images floating into the horizon you contemplate from the white sand. I might have painted myself as a monk, though I married young. My only child, my daughter died, then my wife, of heartbreak. Later I lived in a room by the sea, listening to the gulls and wind in the halyards in the solitude of my own unknowable life. One bleeds into another. Our beloved go on. As the vastness spreads like the sea, the darkness holds no reflection. If the sky is home above Earth and home in the heart, how can it not contain all that I love and long for? The boats, will they return? The birds, will they feed me whose soul darkens the waves? Whose God colors the emptiness lighting the sand? **Onions** *by Barbara Siegel Carlson* All I have this afternoon is my little notebook of mostly blank pages pressed from the pulp of trees. To say in a few words I’m here, in these lines of ink that come from the oils of ancient bodies. On the table beside me in the Globe is the headline recalling last year’s massacre at a music festival that triggered another war in the Middle East—another punch in the gut It’s raining and I turn away to fold my shirts, tuck my socks together. Mahler’s on the shortwave—the drummer’s tap barely audible, the harp strings like water, first a waltz, then the horn carries a Klezmer tune as if from a wedding before the drumming becomes an ominous march cresting to what sounds like crackle and boom, while I sip my mint and sage tea that shimmers like the dreams of people lost in a cave or stricken in the desert after a burning wind, their homes cinders, their mouths tasting of soot. Yesterday we pulled the last of the onions. They look like eyeballs naked and translucent in their brown bowl. You can’t tell one from another. I bit into one, imagining an apple, but the pungency fumed up my nostrils and spread down my throat. I think I was a monk in another life, praying in silence and song, humming with my brothers, sheltered in my cell, blessing the water in puddles, the gardens we tended where pea flowers sprouted deep into autumn. We gathered in prayer and at meals, slept like the dead and blessed each leaf in our books. My life quiet with God lighting my blood. I think of Esenin who at the end used his own blood to write poems. And the mason who watched his dear friend Jesus on the crucifix, but could say or do nothing to save him. Last week during a walk in the woods, a deer leapt out, looked long at me, staring into my eyes—the eyes of an alien, murderer, suicide, washerwoman, slave whose soul has been spun like the rest from the eons, but it holds to my center like a maypole, each lifetime a different colored ribbon winding and unwinding around it, my human scent foreign to the deer, but to me intimate with inexplicable distances and crossings. Who is the Dalai Lama with his thirteen incarnations or the cashier at Cumberland Farms with her thousands of lifetimes, or the girl with a hare-lip photographed on the envelope I throw away with a twinge of guilt and shame because I don’t donate to that charity, and I can’t heal her any more than I can heal my friend’s son who lies in a coma as though in a ship lost to earth? I’ve known a man whose love felt pure, and I wonder if such love can reach across the universe— turning like the tiny cylinder in a music box as it unwinds till you can hear the heartbeat of the stars in the rain of bombed out rooms that washes the blood and dust from our mouths. Spinoza called the cosmos a single substance, each of us marked in the Book of Life with every act, word and thought. When we dance even once in the arms of another, as the bow is sliding across the strings and the notes harmonize to the rustle of water, we somehow melt the frozen fields on Ganymede and taste something holy in the onion.