after listening to Bayo Akomolafe at the Imagine Retreat in Nova Scotia
A lumpy brown bunny with a flat white tail.
Rose hips swollen, softened and red.
The uneven crashing of the restless Atlantic.
In the distance, a shorebird screeching.
And twenty-six thousand light years away
at the center of our galaxy is a black hole
in Sagittarius with the mass of four million suns.
Why should I be surprised
that we’re orbiting a mystery,
that our existence is tied to the invisible,
the unknowable, the violent, the vast?
Beside me the brown bunny nibbles the grass.
The shorebird continues to screech.
Inside me, I feel it, a dense place
from which light cannot escape.
I don’t understand its gravity
and sometimes the force of it frightens me.
Of course, there is mystery at the center.
Around it, because of it, all is becoming—
the kelp, the birds, the seals, the trees,
the rose hips sweet, you, me.
Beside me, the waves crash on, crash on.
There is no way to hush the noise.
I listen, sing along.