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Posts Tagged ‘transition’

Toward Peace

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 10, 2024| 5 Comments »


 
 
Perhaps some part of me still believes
peace is a destination,
a place we arrive, ideally together.
 
I notice how shiny it is, this belief,
like a flower made of crystal,
beautiful, but lifeless,
 
devoid of the dust and scuff
that come from living a real day.
Meanwhile, there is this invitation
 
to grow into peace the way real flowers grow—
in the dirt. With blight and drought,
beetles and hail.
 
Meanwhile this invitation
to live in the tangle of fear and failure,
to be humbled by my own inner wars
 
and wonder how to find a living peace
right here, the peace that arrives
when we take just one step through the mess
 
toward compassion and notice
as our foot rises our heart also rises
and in that lifted moment
 
still scraping along in the dirt,
there is a peace so real we become light,
become the momentum that is the change.
 

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Curvaceous

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 10, 2024| 8 Comments »


 
 
Once, I was a twig of a thing,
  a scrawny, scrappy slender being.
    A sapling. A stalk. A vine.
      My body rhymed with the y-axis,
    with flagpole and street lamp and pine.
  Perhaps I thought it would never change,
confusing my self for my form.
  Perhaps I was afraid it would change,
    my ideas of loving myself so small.
      And now, look at me, a tree-ripened pear.
    A cumulous cloud. A peony.
My body rhymes with river bends
  and nautilus, helix, anemone.
    And I am more me than I’ve
      ever been—as lush on the inside
    as I am to the eye, rounded
  and softened and carved.
How sweet these hours when
  I love what is here—
    which is to say when I love
      the change itself,
    these hours when I wade
  into the mystery, not clinging
to the way things used to be,
  these amorous hours
    when I revel in my curves
      with eyes as forward as a new lover’s hands,
    astonished by my own becoming.

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What Ritual Is

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 27, 2014| 1 Comment »

Om Asato Maa Sad-Gamaya
Tamaso Maa Jyotir-Gamaya
Mrtyor-Maa Amrtam Gamaya

(Sanskrit: Om, lead us from the unreality to the Reality, from the dark to the light, from the fear of death to the knowledge of immortality)

By morning, all the fish are dead.
The silvery minnow. The pale pink gourami.
Both angelfish. They’re all dead, floating
in the tank upside down, two on the bottom,

the others dull at the top. Their eyes
are not yet gauzy. We wake and question what could
have happened. We check the thermometer.
It’s normal. Then what? Did they battle? Was it something

in the water? We wonder what we could have done
to have saved them. It is terrible, the loss, the not
knowing, the feeling of remorse. We long to make
it right somehow, but death has merciless laws.

So we carry them in a bowl to the river
past the willows that survived last night’s frost.
And we release them into the current,
singing them on their way with a song of transition,

though we know that the song is for us.

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something changing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 9, 2013| 1 Comment »

shadows inside
shadows inside (shh, tiptoe)
shadows that was
how many thousand
shadows ago

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Quiet Tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on June 20, 2011| 1 Comment »

After the house
has been emptied by blade,
by flame, by flood,
with such quiet feet
enters peace.

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