This morning, in being still
Finally
For perhaps a moment or two
Everything was achieved.
All that wanting
All that noise
Bothering my body
Constantly crowding this mind
all day long
and maybe
Into the night
Stopped.
And in the silence
I accomplished
the whole of my life’s work.
When my mother was settling down
Into her last sleep
She murmured,
“I have accomplished”
And in floating away on the tide
Into the vast ocean of stillness
She found that that was that
And smiled.
What I find in the silence
Is that all this activity
All these mistakes
All this awkwardness and floundering
Is magnificent.
I swim in it.
I give way to what I am and
what is becoming of all that
in this moment
As in the waters of hot sulfurous springs
we find again the flowing emptiness,
the joy of finding we are nothing
All the noise we have drawn in
to make our way
wherever we have come to
is gone.
As when, in those days
and days without endings
suspended
between the worlds,
we floated in stillness
Beginning only now and then
To sense somehow
through the beating rhythm
Of everything we knew
Somehow
to feel the vibrations
that would eventually
Somehow
capture our soul.
Sing to the Weeds of Spring
Weeding in the garden
at the end of day.
A day of rain that came and came
and then stopped again
just as evening turned
And sun returned
Opening a window
onto that brief passage
of spring to summer skies
I weed the onions
and think how grateful
they now seem
for all that space and light.
They will, I know
Suddenly expand and grow.
I do not pull weeds
But thin instead the plants
that now compete
With those onions
we planted, gently, in the spring
that I wish will grow
as big and sweet and strong
As ever their heritage will allow.
The plants I pull
become the soil
that will then nourish
All this ground
And flourish from our toil
They are equal to the onions
But take another place
In this garden
That will, with all that grows
nourish blood
And become
in time
our bones.
