Deena Metzger

Deena Metzger Poems

Deena Metzger Biography

Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, storyteller and healer. Story is her Medicine. The novels The Other Hand and Doors: A fiction for Jazz Horn, are both published by Red Hen Press. Earlier books of poetry are A Sabbath Among The Ruins, Looking for the Faces of God, The Axis Mundi Poems and Dark Milk. Skin: Shadows/Silence A Love Letter in the From of a Novel and The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them - a novel in the form of a play, (included in her first book on healing, Tree: Essays and Pieces, that features the celebrated Warrior Poster on its cover, testifying to a woman’s triumph over breast cancer) are two examples of her many formal and spiritual explorations imagining a literature responsive to the complexities and necessities of our time, especially the value of actively respecting the numerous voices that constitute an ecology of mind attuned to a sacred universe. Writing For Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds is a text that articulates these possibilities for fellow writers and as do her plays Not As Sleepwalkers and Dreams Against the State. She co-edited an anthology, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, one of the first testimonies to the reality and nature of animal intelligence. Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; and From Grief into Vision: A Council examine the tragic failure of contemporary culture and provide guidance for personal, political, environmental and spiritual healing. A radical thinker on behalf of the natural world and planetary survival, a teacher of writing and healing practices for 40 years, a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleagured world, she, with her husband, writer, Michael Ortiz Hill, introduced Daré to North America ten years ago. Daré is a unique form of individual and community healing based on indigenous and contemporary medicine and wisdom traditions. www.deenametzger.com)

The Best Poem Of Deena Metzger

Under The Sorrow Tree

By the river,
under the sorrow tree,
the universe says
the bones must dance,
and she, who goes out with a net
to catch the spirits,
returns, her hands filled
only with the dark briars
we have hummed
these many years.
The one who sees sorrow
cannot staunch it,
yet by her side
something white
announces itself.
The bones are sucked clean,
the one nearest the heart
becomes a flute,
when you blow,
the dead come
and behind them,
the other bones in a circle

The universe says
loss demands birth
and the two
are lovers.

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