You want to fly, you got to give up the thing that weighs you down. Toni Morrison
Release
Category: Link
Future
The future enters us in order to transform us long before it happens.
Last Days…
LAST DAYS OF WINTER War settles like dust for there is no other side when winds blow particles from Sudan to Hiroshima to icy rivers that wild coho struggle against to lay their bright eggs. On the first day of the first war declared in this century the Asian Art Museum opens its doors with stilt-walkers dressed as emperors and geishas, and with musicians from Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, for music and art transcend transient politics and borders. Even the museum’s map of Asia’s Buddhist centers proclaims Tibet’s sovereignty within China’s yawning border. Across the street a demonstration swells before City Hall to protest a war veiled in an amalgam of virtue, misinformation and covert interests. Something ghostlike transforms this city. While most stores close, in others clerks focus like compulsive-obsessives just to get through the day and homeless walk the streets as if San Francisco’s sole inhabitants. One woman, hair plaited with a plethora of mismatched ribbons mirroring her clothes, crosses against red. She zigzags mostly between the yellow lines while drivers remain uncharacteristically patient as if acknowledging the difficulty of accepting war without dissolving in a despair that threatens one’s ever-transient connection with life. Within these museum’s walls images of Buddha, Bodhisattvas, White Tara embody prayers for all sentient beings and symbolize compassion, wisdom, the acceptance of suffering, as well as our ability to skillfully control rather than be controlled by our mad-wraith desires. It’s no longer a matter of us versus them, good versus evil. We are all messengers of God and we are all godless. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. All those who have lived and don’t yet live share our bodies through the food we eat, the air we breathe, the cells that ferociously regenerate throughout our lives. Prayer wheels fill these halls with unbound intent that passes through the walls, the streets, the world: may all beings be healthy, may all beings be happy, may all beings live in peace.
Thank you to the editors of Buddhist Poetry Review for first publishing this poem.
Compassion
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
Jack Kornfield
Healing
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
Swayed
When an 85 lb. mammal licks your tears away, then tries to sit on your lap, it’s hard to feel sad.
Stare
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention. Flannery O'Connor
Beneath It All
BENEATH IT ALL
Love’s a hitchhiker,
so innocent in its leap
that it doesn’t register
torn seats or sunroofs
but simply hears
Come on in
and feels that smile
like a warm winter breeze,
but relationships
are rarely so simple:
the car must be washed
repaired, replaced
and trips planned
and changed with the
frequency of newborns’
diapers amidst increasing
conflict till compromise
shatters
like a windshield at eighty
against the centennial oak
but love, love’s not so
complicated—once stripped
of metal and fuel it
shimmers naked, senses
open to sky and skunk,
blizzards and vistas,
and is never
blind but radiant as a star
and enigmatic as a body
after the heart’s
final
beat.
Thank you to the editors of The Tishman Review for first publishing this poem.
Vision
Is there a more mysterious idea for the artist than to imagine the way nature is reflected in an animal’s eye. How does a horse see the world? Or an eagle? Or a deer or a dog? What a miserable convention that leads us to place animals in a landscape that pertains to our eyes rather than plunging ourselves into the animal’s soul in an attempt to understand his vision of things.
BLM V
THE TIME IS ALWAYS RIGHT TO DO WHAT IS RIGHT.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 