Skip to content
Back to issue
From: Vol.10 N.01 – Private: The Transformative Now

This Body that Carries Us

by Madronna Holden
If I touch your eyes 
will I see horizons
empty themselves 
toward breathless 
mountains?

If I touch your shoulders
will I release the song sparrows
that accompany your days? 

If touch your hands, 
will I understand why 
so many things in this world 
come in twos?

If I touch your heart, 
will I feel mornings
knocking at the door 
of your bones
with their tender 
and stormy 
promises?

Sweet net of skin, 
you have caught me too:
the birds in my blood 
are rustling in their nest.

Thus the transformation 
has begun: we have slipped 
into bark and feather, 
wing and fin, 
under the night sky 
at the moment when 
everything adds up 
to the moon.

Under the day sky 
when the salmon 
chooses her river,
the hawk chooses 
her sky.

Now we know something 
of what the body knows:
how it can expound and prophesy
in preparation for everything—

instructing us how to love this world
with all those spirits speaking their names
next to our hearts.
Published: April 2023
Madronna Holden

won the 2022 Kay Snow Poetry Award—a contributor’s prize from Camas Magazine, and her work has been selected as poem of the day by Verse Daily. Her work has appeared in over thirty literary journals including The Bitter Oleander, Cold Mountain Review, Equinox Poetry and Prose, Valley Voices and the Christian Science Monitor. She is the author of the chapbook, Goddess of Glass Mountains (Finishing Line Press, 2021)

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED