Three New Books: The Sparrow Wars; The Poetry of Allison Grayhurst – completed works from 2022 to 2025 (Volume 8); Every Tree That Burns – a collection of poems about loss, grief and renewal
Book 40 The Sparrow Wars (2025, Edge Unlimited Publishing; ISBN: 9798298279604; ISBN: 9798277686737; ASIN:…
Open
Open Soak the born in their own initial conception to remember the pure-memory-pockets, the truth of miracles. Underline everything that matters and read it again until no small word is skimmed over or taken for granted. Open the shelter doors and let all animals in,…
Touch
Touch The first touch was bitter, tantamount to an attack, deception from a vantage point of spiritual superiority. The second touch was touching a tomb, still full of stench though the flesh had rotted long ago - just dry bones, barely a full form. The third touch angered, like when a snake…
Walk
Walk Then the bitter defeat was burning like a sin committed, recognized and unforgiveable. Then on a hill, heavy with weighted down legs and an injury there, debilitating but unexplained, the challenge came to walk. Walk slowly at first, walk like I can walk even though the reins are dropped…
Small Moon
Small Moon A small moon melted fleshed out a sure-footed sacrifice but changed directions, too quickly into the direction of a red star. Then her heart was burned, crispy and crumbling, no more a perfect circle, drooping on one side, gravity became queen of her false crescendo song.…
Talk
Talk If I talk again, I will keep my end-mind twisted so it cannot speak or formulate a plan. I have no constitution for plans or wherewithal for achieving human-made provisions. If I talk again, silence me into prayer, conversing only with the angelic order, strengthened by devotion and the…
A Love Like No Other
A Love Like No Other Your steady love has saved me, one more dark wave rising and you hold my hand, staying the course, sharing with me your glowing inspiration, giving me space to expose my gruesome wounds within. You do not flinch, or distract, but give me room to writhe…
Over
Over Under siege like an anthill invaded upon by an anteater. Summer is tainted with humidity and boredom, intermingled with strong bouts of unholy despair. I hear nothing when my hands are outstretched. I receive nothing in the hollow of the rock I am crushed inside of and asked there,…
Surrendered
Surrendered In the middle - steady, harsh waves, salty flavoured ocean, stranded, treading. Love comes smiling. It is a ghost. Joy comes and passes by. Purpose comes but floats by like a jellyfish riding the momentum. In the middle, tired of treading, no escape, just the ebb and…
She
She Fear is splendid in making the body inflamed, bloated on trepidation at the news of many meadows burning. She hurried and found a healer inside herself, willing to go the distance and forfeit personal power for a greater acquisition. She understood the traveller and the sit-at-homer…
You were born
You were born with the light of a nebula inside of you, natural as your loving smile tortured now by isolation and a waning strength that has your commitment maimed and muted. But underneath that light still surges, cannot be snuffed out or ignored. You are blessed with…
Ghost
Ghost Gone, dripping down the drain after a cut. Gone, the sweet flavour lingering of maple syrup on the tongue. Gone like democracy from a land conquered by a tyrant. Gone like inspiration from the crushing overtones, undertones, all-tones of relentless grief. Gone like a love that was…
Molasses-dream
Molasses-dream The fighting blood, and the power of broken bones mending. Flip the unknowing cause of famine and feed on faith like a summer’s feast of fruits and nuts accepted as a birthright. Change is incremental, even the change of death takes time to incorporate into the…
Slowly the builder builds
Slowly the builder builds but the miracle-maker is quick - enormous change, dreamt-of-no-longer. The end-result is a shock of grace and the depths of God’s power displayed, gifted for no deserving reason but love and the faith that the receiver has in that love,…
Star
Star I think if I was a trillion-year-old star blazing, always in deep transformation, pulling planets into my orbit and asteroids and the tips of angel-wings, bypassing, touching, fearless, as bright or brighter manoeuvring with unexpected harmony then remembering would be easy - to…
Out
Out I asked to be let out from that unwanted accomplishment. I asked to shed my shame, my duty and the hard-core call of doing time. It was taken down and away from me, along with so much more. Guilt, and worldly bondage also fell along with security, along with a strange, twisted pride.…
Much Much and Many
Much Much and Many I see what my eyes betray, but see the rising healing corridor shine and expand to set right the direction of the wind and the lack that keeps leaking until more lack insults all hope. I see this home delivered, angels laughing in each corner and the…
Milky Way
Milky Way Rare soot lengthening into the vacuum stream between stars. Even more rarified, it lulls in ghostly formations merging on the horizon, thicker where they combine, overlapping bubbles, hotter through the closed door. Nested motions with no net-motion overall, a scribble…
Hubris
Hubris Steady as logic dictates the truth of superstitious rotation and effect, unmasks the mystic trappings of a fated existence ritual locked into the spinning orbs lightyears away, locked like us to the gravity of the sun, but no more, and if it is more, the intricate complexities of…
Lift II
Lift II If I stay under ice in a house as vast as the sea, cut off from the sun, I will bloat up on anxiety’s quickening, gaining nothing but a heaviness uncurable and inevitable as iron-core gravity, heating. So I will lift myself up onto the sides of the cracked ridges, gaze at the…
This Place
This Place From a place of trust I glimpse your magnificence, your harnessed race of complexities in harmony, slow moving, more powerful than a hundred suns conjoining. From a place of faith, being wrong is just as exciting as being right - a longing to know you,…
Head bowed
Head bowed The numbing curse of resentment comes to capture me in its lumpy maggot-riddled corpse, putting on my back a burden I am aware of I cannot keep. And even though I wash and scrub, daily cleansing myself of its putrid stench, it returns, living, climbing my shoulders into…
Sparrow Wars
Sparrow Wars I Sludge water dripping into an already clogged pipe. Blood in my microscope, torn out like a diary page, necessary to analyze the ingredients. Will the wound lift? be inverted into a creative windstorm or a nemesis spread, spidery-vein spreading until the curse is…
Walkways – the poem – part 16 of 16
…. Principles of duty overtaking sleep like a wave. Heavy love rooted in isolation, reflecting the depths of true giving. A condition turns to disease, restrictions bare down. What is ordinary becomes like a cage. Children in the drifting storm, drifting on…
Walkways – the poem – part 15 of 16
…. Gaze, focus, hold. Unconscious stream of raw fluidity streaming, rising over barriers, drowning them with the pressure of an open door. Cracks of circumstantial disease, creating pockmarks to expand destiny choices, fashioning gifts to give, earned by…
Walkways – the poem – part 14 of 16
…. Fresh, potted bright as an angel. Death is a whip I put down. Ill health slumber, but God is my mercy-king. Queen of loving miracles. I will sing to keep the right intention and grieve minimally for what I cannot do. Little red tree, no higher than a…
Walkways – the poem – part 13 of 16
…. For a while - deathcamps, blue balls baskin’robbins. Play tomorrow the lute-song of today and remember the ground-swell pounding paradise into my brain, collapsing from overload, reloading fodder and flighty friendships I’ve lost use for. Nothing counts,…
Walkways – the poem – part 12 of 16
…. Once, gentle. Now, riled and nowhere but where the stench of sewage is piled on the curb. The gears of bitter disappointment snatching you into a feral hold. Exotic tall weeds, broken at the base. Friendships are spoiled at the root, even love is overshadowed…
Walkways – the poem – part 10 of 16
…. Many years torn - a leaf, a paper towel, half around the other side, locked on the beach of my nadir - discipline and a cold cruel courage, jammed into a groove. Just the sunlight on my wall, warming the wall, penetrating the heavy plaster. I was born from…
