Month: October 2023

I had just seen the half moon 

In a circle of azure light

And then a planet blinking 

Through the branches of a tree 

That danced with the singing wind

When the tinkling sound of bells

Reminded me that  goats

Were grazing  still

In those dark deepening 

shades of  night.

 

How can we have such beauty 

And still close our hearts

To love.

How can we have come here

together

 for this little moment on earth

And still not hear the dove.

 

What are we doing

While we careen

 down the roadway of hate. 

How are we so distracted

By the ways we have 

Had to create

Such divisions, distinctions

Protracted conclusions

Based on emotions 

We never examine

Or sate.

 

We repeat the mistakes

Of the humans before us

The conflict the horror

The strife

Despite all our casings

Of advanced technological life.

We have come for the beauty

The grief , the delight

Even the horror of night.

 

But we continue to turn to our neighbor

As if she has not done the same

We call her by some other name

So that all of the sorrow we’ve felt here

Can have someone different to blame.

 

 

Holiness seeps in quietly

And soaks through every cell

Until there is nothing  left

but peace.

 

It has found me

WIthout warning 

In the midst of morning run

When a fragrant tree of  spring

The calling of a bird, 

Migrating in the air of every breath

Opened the flow of universe

Through doors of birth and death.

 

It has found me wandering 

In forests wet and green

When the patch of moss laid bare

under a curve of log

sent up its gentle scent.

 

It has awed me in those places

I least expect its grace.

In the midst of some cathedral

Built on dogma and distess

In the arches soaring upward

 We imagine flight

Where by some simple curvature 

of time and space

The vibrations of so many hearts

 Transform boundaries into light.

 

It has settled on me 

In the home

Of those women I have known

Whose every breath 

Has come directly

Through their beating hearts

In the  touch of hand on head

Cradled in a lap.

 

Yet it eludes me!

I forget it

When It is here in every moment

I wait to find it somewhere else

In memory or anticipation

In travel and in pilgrimage

Where the confluence of 

Time’s rivers 

In unending transmigration

Have left some silt of love. 

 

I seek it

Anywhere but here 

Where it nestles

Gently, present yet unknown

Its strength like  waves 

of  warm sweet breath

Of hibernating bears 

in caves.