Bring your dream to life!
Weaving beautiful images, storytelling and biomimicry —Dream Hatching shares simple metaphors of wisdom from the bird world.
The book follows the process of birds: from finding their flock and listening for the call to nesting and finally, to finding their wings. Dream Hatching celebrates the epic adventure that is life.
INSPIRING
BEAUTIFUL
SO SPECIAL
VULNERABLE and FIERCE
OBSESSIVE
“Mears is persistent, keeps working it over like an old dog with a tattered wool sock. “ – Anacortes American
A collection of 43 poems pulled from the deep, on a search for treasures of the soul. The itinerary is initiation, descent and transformation.
“Mayday, mayday,” she whispers to the Starfish,
patron saint of the Stranded and Clinging.
In this ritual of Sinking,
jumping ship is her favorite part,
a mutiny against herself.
Diving deep, she becomes the sea’s mad secretary:
taking the moon’s dictation,
dredging a rough translation.
She trades breath for buried treasure:
barnacle-encrusted words.
Scooping them, she rises,
swimming toward the light.
In this ritual of Resurrection,
she hauls out a killing in wild Helvetica:
prayers from below sea level.
~ from The Mystic at Minus Tide
Traveler
With a full moon strapped to her back,
she stakes down a flapping corner of sky,
slip knotting home to a low horizon.
She gathers tinder from the duff,
ignites it with the sharp note of a nocturnal hymn.
She stands too close to the fire,
but rises, wingless, like an ember.
Leaning back against the darkness
she wraps her shoulders with thick folds of midnight.
Dreams herself as wild terrain — that hill is her hip;
the sky her mind; a falling star,
the moon she miscarried seven years ago.
Follow the blush of first light to find her
lacing up restless bones,
re-inventing a choreography
with the wind and her best intentions,
shimmering, just out of reach.
Marking this Threshold
I inherited sturdy Irish marrow,
bones good for trudging
knee-deep in the estuary.
Something inside me
yearns to give thanks
for the use of them.
A wild and intimate ritual
to the infrastructure
of my days.
I lay these bones on the altar,
saying something about ashes,
about grieving the whos
I could have been; and
how meager I was
scooping tablespoons
of Infinite Love.
You must know by now
the ceremony I create
will smell like tree sap
and lavender.
It will have water and prayers,
and West-facing poems.
I place these bones,
astounded
at their adventures,
never once breaking
the way my heart always does.
I take bone inventory,
as a laborer at dusk
returns tools to the shed.
I lay my jointed jaw down,
tallying the times
it erupted with laughter,
how often it clenched
for no good reason.
I lay these rib bones
and the breaths they harbored,
funding time and possibility.
How else could I have danced?
I offer an incantation
to my vertebrae
this zippered magic
that lets me move
like seaweed in surf
or stand my ground
like a flag pole.
I offer up these bendable knees
handy when life kicks my ass.
The hands delivering
this message now
have been dipped
in holy water,
floated in the womb,
washed a thousand dishes,
floors and babies’ bottoms.
These gadgets even
fit in my pockets.
Thank you.
I offer thanks, too
for this thick skull —
guardian of the madness.
Soon enough, or maybe later
these bones will be relics,
then ashes, then dust.
What remains, what rises
is only the dancing,
the laughter,
and Infinite Love.
© constance mears
Bones of Thunder
Silence to the inner ear is like the eye
of a storm — still point suspended
in a swirling circumference of chaos.
It is a category 5 disaster
to live your whole life
in that silence,
in the eye that is not your own.
Dreams flash like brilliant veins of light.
I’m still counting: one decade, two decades…
Picking through the aftermath,
I find a Polaroid from 1965.
Father of six, waiting in the Ford,
smiling, drumming his fingers on the dashboard,
while mother shops after Church.
Two fish and five loaves:
it was always the same miracle.
My father had a game, which was kind of a plea:
Who can be the quietest?
I could. I won, by rolling down the window
of myself. At first, I would surface randomly,
in a boulder hunched on the road’s shoulder.
In time, I learned to leave and return
like the eye of a needle, disappearing, emerging,
weaving threads of participation,
baste-stitching myself to this world.
One time I summoned my whole mind
to become the dining room table,
father smiling, drumming his fingers
on the edge of my wooden face.
At your request I can become:
a 30-piece orchestra in a sound-proof booth;
a riot of mimes – mute mayhem –
buckled into the backseat.
I am the Pacific with the volume down,
foaming at the mouth,
smuggling a universe behind my back.