Colleen Morton Busch - Tend

With her poem “Tend”, Bay Area Zen poet Colleen Morton Busch offers a gift of wisdom, acceptance, and nourishment to readers. The opening line of “Tend” (You are whole) sings forth like a mantra, mindful of our perfection, even in imperfection. “about illness and the limitations of living in a human body, filtered through a Zen perspective, “Tend” is from Colleen’s forthcoming debut poetry collection, Smolder. “Tend” was first featured on David Keplinger’s Mindfulness Initiative Poetry Meditations in February 2026 (https://davidkeplinger.substack.com/p/tending-our-fires-the-four-elements).

Tend

You are whole
someone carved into the bark of a manzanita
and painted it white for ease of seeing
beyond the stuffed Little Free Library
the curbside box of plump Meyer lemons
the sign in a child’s cheerful scrawl
please take and enjoy

One morning I simply woke
no longer committed to my sorrow
the scrub jay nest empty
for a second spring
knowing without knowing how
it’s possible to grow another heart inside the heart
to be the creek that flows beneath the ground in a rainless year

Colleen Morton Busch

Colleen Morton Busch is the author of Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, a work of nonfiction published by Penguin Press and selected by Publisher’s Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble as a best book of the year in 2011. Her debut poetry collection, Smolder, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest and is forthcoming from Ex Ophidia Press in summer 2026. Her work spans genres and has appeared most recently in The Bellevue Literary Review. She grew up in the Midwest but lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lay-ordained Zen practitioner, she currently serves as board president at Berkeley Zen Center. Find her at www.colleenmortonbusch.com