Dragons Turning Into Snakes
Samizdat Secret Series V2
Winter 2025
DIGITAL DOWNLOAD for sharing and reading on devices:
YOUR ASSIGNMENT, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT….
Select one or more poems from this collection.
Print or write longhand on a piece of paper or object of your choice.
Post this tangible relic in a public location as discretely as you wish.
Optional: Post to social with hashtag #dragonsturningintosnakes2025
a few words on the making of….
This is the second in the Secret series. The first, “The Secret Book of Shadow and Light,” emerged from curating poetry on six floors of a downtown NYC mansion for a three month social club experiment. Poems on black card stock written in gold ink were created and selected for each floor, from themes of darkness to the light, lowest chakras to the highest.
Dragons turning Into Snakes is as much a snapshot as a poet’s liturgy for entering, abiding and surrendering to the alchemy of winter, the darkness of mysteries. It moves through thresholds of a winter descent with a touch of romance, blooms of grief and naked silence towards hints of spring. From the great majestic pauses of snowfalls to rains, from womb-sleep to birthing, from hibernation, dreaming and metabolizing experience to readying for new adventures. Many of the poems take the reader off the page and into the world– like glowing ingots pulled from the blacksmith’s hearth.
What Dragons turning into Snakes conjures will be unique to everyone. Astrologically, 2024 was the Yang Wood Dragon year– a vast, expansive view and power with few resolutions. 2025 is the Yin Wood Snake– as if the great flying dragon lands and draws all its power into the tiny form of a newborn snake, a terrestrial seed, a mystic current tunneling further. How does vast experience pollinate or feed into our deepest subconscious well? What to do with lightning?
Three main resources stocked this treasury of verse: 1) Poetry books at public libraries in NY; 2)Interweb vaults, starting with poems from 2024 leading to sites of poets and publishers; 3) Contributions from poet allies and my own trove. The hunt gathered 237. The final edition has 91.
Consulting the i ching. The Question: What hexagram best expresses the meaning of this collection and this moment for all who read it? The answer: 53. Consider the Cafe au Soul readings.
All printing: My trusty Brother Black & White Laser Printer. The carabiner rings are my fancy touch. Along with a marvelous wealth of poetry, during this journey I reread Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books (her poem below) and found fresh gateways for griefwork in The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
Does the way lead out or in?
At the center, or the door, will I be free?
No choices left to make. I follow on
the maze whose gate and goal are mystery.
